by Noy Holland
“I mean it, sugar. You need anything? You sounded like you hurt.”
“I hurt,” Bird says, “and I improve. Every day by day. The bone knits up quite nicely. You?”
“Bruised,” Suzie says. “Nothing broken. My ass is an unsightly yellow and my head is a little green.”
“Your timing’s bad.”
“I should say.”
“I’ll let you go.”
“I’m broke. I want a little dope for when he’s here.”
“That’d be nice,” Bird says.
“We make our choices, I guess.”
“And then we lie in them. I’m not floating you a loan.”
“I didn’t ask you to. I asked if you were okay,” Suzie says.
“Well I slept and then you called and then I slept a little more. And then the baby waked.”
“We make our choices.”
“We do.”
Bird thinks again of her husband sleeping, the warmth of his breath on his pillow.
It takes a funny sort of discipline to give yourself away.
Bird tries again to summon it and balks at the want for uncharted sleep while the sun swings under the world. But who sleeps anymore? Not even Suzie.
The phone rings in the dark. Suzie needs a ride from the bus stop. Suzie spent her last nickels on pizza. Suzie’s new pal she’s been sleeping with shoved her lightly on accident—on accident—down the stairs.
“But you should see him,” Suzie says, “sleeping. He sleeps with his eyes open. He sleeps with his arms tossed over his head like a falling god. The moon is on him. It draws the tides in him toward the air—like dew, opened up, like he’s blooming, like he is some succulent moon-white bloom dropped into my bed and lethal. I could tear him apart just to touch him.”
“And he is what,” Bird asks, “seventeen?”
“Newly carved. The boy glows like a skinned pear.”
Bird’s boy tugs at her robe. He needs her, it’s true. He needs his blue socks. He wants that yellow hat with that M.
Bird wants the heart to hang up, quit—but she can’t summon it quite, never has.
The morning is going. She finds the grooved spoon, favored. She ladles oatmeal over an army guy, a gluey mass, a joke he’ll get, go, “Unh?”
He wants toast. He wants a little toast with syrup. May she make him a dosht with seebup and butter and one little dust of the cinnamon, Mama, “Mama, please, if you don’t, will you please?”
“If I don’t?” she asks.
“I will never say good night to you again.”
“Are you talking to me?” Suzie wants to know. “I’m still here.”
“Hold on, hold on,” Bird says to both of them, and each of them says, “No way.”
Her boy plunges out the door into the morning dew and appears again at the window. He grins, a mess, his lip is split, his teeth a train wrecked in his head. He licks the glass—there’s an X—and is gone.
“I’m still here,” Suzie says, “but I’m going, sugar. We may never speak again.”
“Oh, quit,” Bird says.
“I’m just saying.”
“Well, don’t,” Bird says. “Take care of yourself, would you?”
“Oh, I do,” Suzie says. “I take lots of care.”
“Don’t let your poet knock you down the stairs.”
“Fool me once,” Suzie says.
“Says the president.”
“Remember that mother in Brooklyn who tripped going down the stairs—”
“Goodbye, Suzie.”
“—and drove that pipe into her head?” Suzie says. “That was awful.”
“Suzie.”
“We may never speak again.”
“You would miss my milky oatmeal,” Bird says, stirring, “with the raisins plumped up just right.”
“Your scraped toast I love.”
“Exactly.”
“The smell of fire in every room.”
When it was summer still, days you could still ride a bike in your skirt or ride your girl around town in a ragtop, your dog; summer still, days kids bang the hydrants open and drive their bodies hard through the spray; Haitians on the stoop, hypodermics; music blaring up and down the street; summer still (No Sitting Aloud); White Castle burgers for breakfast (too hot to cook, too easy not to want to) for dinner, if they ate it, for lunch, for a time; days the ground-up mess of their haunches still healed from skidding out on Bird’s bike in the street, the skin mounding over the glass they had picked up, tried to pick out, evermore would carry; days the willows in the park wore their hair down still for Mickey and Bird to lie under, in the sun should the wind allow it, in the shadows on their faces as they slept; before the nights cooled, before the first leaves turned, Bird and Mickey thought to find a place together.
They found a place burned up by a voodoo drummer who had left his candles burning. Cat tipped over the candlestick. The kitty litter ignited. The guy was banging his skins, meantime, at a fertility rite in Queens.
It was a step up, sure, from the ragtop. But the place was sooty head to foot when Bird and Mickey moved in, velvety with ash. Every room smelled of fire.
Bird’s mother appeared and said: Run.
“Why slum?” Suzie said. “It’s stupid. You could live uptown like I do.”
“You could keep your feet in a bucket,” Bird said.
But what Suzie said was true: they were broke but they didn’t have to be. It was a thing to try. It was a badge of something, a feeling they liked—not to live every day a scrubbed-up life, sensibly decided, steaming on ahead. It was a way to keep things from happening: to be, and to hold themselves off from becoming.
Neighbor kids banged the hydrant open, summer days, and launched their bodies through the spray. The water seemed to drive clean through them. There was a boy Bird thought looked like Mickey as a boy—a skinny, noble, wild-looking boy who made her want to make her own wild boy and drive him far away.
Drive away, go away. We could, Bird insisted, even early on—before the signs coalesced. The trees were turning. The ragtop hadn’t been towed.
Instead they scrubbed and scraped and painted, settled in. Bird took a job for a week and quit it—crumbing tables, some fancy joint. She wanted to keep to home. They built a bed from scrap. They found a table on the street and bought daisies and ate them, all but one. They threw sticks in the river for the dog to fetch, who fished out sheets of plywood, a boot, a mannish, ragged, woolly coat they dragged home for her to sleep on.
The dog slept underneath their bed. She whimpered when they fucked and clawed at the floor and bounded up and down the hall.
Run, her mother kept saying.
And Suzie said, “Why?”
But they liked it. The sun slid a finger through the alley, afternoons, and laid it across their bed.
“It’s like food,” Mickey said, and pushed her legs apart, “for your flower. Let me have a look at that flower.”
And: “I looked in the mirror just now. I reminded me of you. Does that make sense? Do you see, Bird?”
“I can’t see right,” he said. “You make me dizzy and I want to fall down. I want to bite into your neck dust in your throat on my hand your blood on my cock and legs and I’m home sticky summer night, I am breathing your breath and you cry out and I want to fuck you so hard, Bird, now, now and for the rest of us living.”
He fed her honey. Persimmon and chocolate. Guess. Silken lumpy cream. Mickey jabbed at Bird with the honey spout, drew a bead along her belly, up, like a suture that has risen and healed. Be still. Be still.
I want to see.
But they couldn’t really—see. The world had shrunk by then to become them.
The wind picked leaves from the trees. Nobody walked the stretch they could see of their street. Nobody descended any longer in the cold on a thread to throw his bramble of sparks at the bridge. The river went its way in quiet, tugging garbage scows to sea.
They burned candles and dreamed of fire.
T
he cold pulled the color from the sky, the streets. The sun angled off for the season.
A band set up underneath their bed in the basement with the rats and the stopped-up john; they played sheet metal, paint can, pipe; the clacking pods of weed and tree. The sound was awful and the smell was worse: fat stools mounded and toppled in the john—the band members used the john like a bucket. The rats fled the basement and along came the mice with their paper scraps and hair they found and cobs of corn and chicken bones and they lived in the walls at Mickey and Bird’s and in the dumbwaiter shaft. When the band played, a veil of paint flickered down from the walls.
Water streamed down the walls and from the ceiling when the up-neighbors filled their tub. The pipes leaked; the joists softened with rot. The voodoo drummer lived upstairs now and pulled his pod in the tub. They heard him grinding on his ass while the tub drained out, his baby in the kitchen, whimpering. He named her Precious—who had been squeezed out into life in that tub.
The mother cut the cord and swaddled the baby and left it in the kitchen sink. She had a bag already packed. She pushed through the door, tripped on the stoop, drove the shorn end of a railing pipe hard into her brain.
A clean bargain, a swap. No one spoke of it.
At last the days, grown cold, grew colder still. The band members cast down their instruments and went elsewhere to keep warm.
Good thinking, Bird thought. Move along.
But Bird and Mickey stayed put and watched the leaden skies of winter spit the first hard knots of snow.
When the shorn-off curls of the Hasidim boys came blowing down the street, Bird picked one out to ransom. A rat came to them, hissing, dragging the trap that had snapped on its haunches.
These were signs, Bird knew, legible enough, if a person meant to read them.
“We should go,” Bird ventured, but they didn’t. To go would mean something was over—that first bright febrile feeling.
Bird wrote a letter to her mother, and addressed it to her father, and stood in line at the post office to buy a tropical stamp. A man in his hat stood behind her, a stone in robes, a band of fur, his child in the carriage asleep. Bird was dressed in a breezy skirt. She dressed for the way the day had looked when she looked out through the window. She dressed for sun, for girls with chapping midriffs, for boys with no socks and shaved heads.
The man in his robes stood behind her, with his wife in her wig behind him, with next his sickly girls. His cane was polished. He used it to bring Bird’s skirt up, thrust it between her legs. He tapped her once, tamped at her.
“Dirty goy,” he whispered.
Dirty, dirty Jew.
Bird bought a pregnancy test on her way home. She would bathe when she got home and wake Mickey. She would run a bath scalding hot and listen for birds in the airshaft—creaking dullards that stayed behind when all the singing pretties flew south. He would feed her cantaloupe in the bathtub how he used to. And she would tell him. She would show him the stick she had peed on—the watery bands of blue.
Part way home, Bird broke into a run and ran past their stoop and around the block—once, and twice again. She was limber then, her blood moving. She would kiss Mickey awake and tell him everything she knew.
But he was gone. For days he was gone, no note that said where.
The note in the kitchen said: Let me when I come home to you slowly unbraid your hair. Please please please please.
And in the bedroom: Please please please maybe marry me.
Bird sat on the bed waiting, the pregnancy stick in his coffee cup by the bedside for him to find. If an ambulance passed, she pedaled after it to be sure it wasn’t him.
It wasn’t him.
A week passed, two. It wasn’t him.
And then it was.
Contusions, concussion—they called Bird to come to the ER. Mickey had stepped onto an elevator that wasn’t there and fallen three floors down the airshaft. He was sobbing when she got there: the doctors had opened him up, he swore, and found nothing but sticks and leaves.
“You’ll be fine,” Bird said. “It’s all fine, you’ll see. We could marry. I will never use your comb.”
“We could what?” Mickey said, and Bird blurted it out—the news of the missing days: dirty Jew, cantaloupe, the stick she had left in his coffee cup, a baby, they were going to have a baby, how did that sound to him?
“It was dark where I fell,” he told her. “I didn’t know where I was. A day passed before anyone came. I didn’t know would the elevator start up and what would happen if it did. I didn’t like the pictures—what I looked like zapped, what I looked like crushed. I kept seeing you when you found me. I was bleeding. I kept moving away from my blood—it would conduct the charge, I decided. I’d be fried in a puddle of blood. Or I’d be saved, but when they hauled me up the cable to lift me out, I would pick up a fatal splinter, a strand worked loose from the braided steel that would sail through me like a spear thrown into the royal chamber of my heart. You’re in my royal chamber, Bird. But my head feels broken open. Every word feels like fire I speak.”
When they got back to their place from the hospital, the up-neighbors’ tub had fallen through. With it came diapers and droppings, a bloodied tampon, a gnawed-on bone, a poisoned rat as long as Bird’s arm with its eyes busted out of their sacks.
“That was lucky,” Mickey offered, serious.
He was armored in pharmaceuticals, resplendent in the sun. Untouchable.
“Try to touch me,” he said.
They hadn’t been crushed, after all, by any of it—not by a rising elevator, not by a falling tub. Mickey brightened for weeks with the luck of it. He rubbed Bird’s belly sweetly, speaking her mother’s name. She would jump horses, their girl, as her mother had. She would play violin on a riverbank. She would know to fill a tub when the ice storm came and lay in wood and sit tight. She’d have hobbies—stamps and woodcuts, earrings of feathers and beads.
“Little Caroline, little Caroline,” Mickey told her, “we will knit you a poncho each year. We will sleep out under the apple trees in spring when the blossoms blow down.”
The days grew colder still. They dragged the tub into the bedroom at last and used it like a barrel to burn in—sticks and leaves and coconut husks and books they had read, to keep warm.
It is cold where we are and quiet, Bird wrote.
We will have to wreck one another, she wrote.
I am happier than ever, Mother, she wrote.
And: I have never been so scared.
“You scared?”
“You?”
“Maybe.”
“No.”
Mickey pressed a pillow against her face.
“Don’t be scared, Bird. Do you want to die or live?”
When Mickey had healed enough to move again, before the Vicodin ran out, they rode bikes across the bridge in the drizzle to their dark bar on Avenue B. They were swacked before they got there and shaking with cold. In the warm, they drank and drank.
Bird knew better. The babies of drunks were lumpish. She knew better than a diet of White Castle and junk and Almond Joys. Sleep and greens, she knew, dark berries. You weren’t ever to kill a spider those months or walk through a silver web. She hung their mittens; she kept their hats up off the bed. She kept their shoes switched and sorted for luck how her mother always told her, with the left shoe in the right foot’s place, the right in the left, lined up. Little tricks—for slipping babies out past the gods.
But more than this, Bird worked to seem as Mickey mostly was: mostly she worked on forgetting she had a baby in her at all.
Their song was on repeat on the jukebox; the regulars sat their stools. It was warm inside, swampy almost—wet clothes and the heat of bodies. The bartender wore a shirt slashed across the back to let his tattoo show. An ampersand, the bartender’s tat. And is truer than but, they agreed. They drank whiskey and felt exalted. Bird’s flocked-around feeling had gone.
They pushed out of the bar and the spiderwebs, meaty-
looking and clotted with dust, swung in the burst of wind.
The street was torn up. There were pipes stacked up on the sidewalk—spanking-new silver lengths of pipe big enough to creep in, light enough to roll. They crept into a pipe and lay flat—cramped twins, knotted up, minutes apart, their bodies the same size. The pipe hummed in the wind and sleet. Bird kissed Mickey and, on the count of three, they threw their weight to one side. Now they were rolling. It hurt—which was funny. To be stewed in the swampy heat of the bar and now thrash about in the cold and grit, the reverb bright and tinny—everything was funny. The pipe banged down off the sidewalk and onto Avenue B, easy enough, gaining speed. Whiskey made it fast and flashy. They bucked against one another, bloodied themselves on the ribs of the pipe. They saw a taxi whip past through the mouth of the pipe and streetlights, streetlights passing, an umbrella inside out. Mickey shouted something that sounded like Wa Lou Re. Which was funny. Dumbass kidstuff funny. A woozy, goofy feeling.
Worth it?
Naw. Maybe.
Worth a trip to the ER, worth a trip to the morgue?
Yeah. Owright. Maybe.
Wa Lou Re.
Now Bird could make him out. “Will you?”
“Yes.”
“Marry me?”
“Yes.”
“Will you marry me?”
“Yes, yes, yes.”
They had spent all their nickels on whiskey so they wriggled from the pipe and flagged down a cab and bolted on the fare when they got home. They were wet to the bone and happy—hoped to sleep so, wake so, keep it. They kept out of range at the back of their place, leaning into each other, kissing, until the cabbie whipped a stick at their window and peeled off down the street.
They would burn a fire to warm themselves and sleep under a heap of blankets, the dog dreaming at their knees. But the dog didn’t come when they called her. The dog had been hanged from the heating duct. The note was from the landlord: you owe me four months’ rent.
Mickey lifted the dog to carry her, her front legs over his shoulders. He carried her like the sleeping child they were never going to have and laid her down on their bed to look at her and whisper curses in her ear. Toilet paper clung to her whiskers from drinking from the unflushed bowl. Mickey used Bird’s brush to brush the dog and scraped her teeth clean with a key.