“Born to better, huh?” the nurse said. “Weren’t we all.”
Birdy was going to reply I think not, but just as she opened her mouth to speak, the grocery store carnations hit the blue curtain that divided Birdy from chaos, from trash and the people who talked it, and the flowers that didn’t stick to the canvas fell to the floor with a damp thump.
“I can’t do this anymore!” shouted the young woman’s boyfriend. “You’re impossible to please. Plus”—he stopped dramatically at the edge of the curtain—“you’re a cunt.” Then he stormed out, clipping the day nurse in the shoulder as he walked by.
“Hey!” the nurse said. “Watch yourself.”
While the nurse’s back was turned, Birdy grabbed two Dixie Cups of orange capsules from the cart and, without thinking, without caring, swallowed the lot in two big gulps. The thin plastic coating dissolved against the roof of her mouth, releasing a cascade of tiny, sweet-tasting beads that chased one another down Birdy’s throat like bubbles. Scrubbing bubbles, she thought. Ahhh, the relief. Where’s the fire? What fire? She saw steam rise from somewhere, heard the hiss of flames being doused. She crumpled the cups and held them. Maybe they would melt, turn to wax figures, birds in her palm. Maybe they wouldn’t.
“Told you,” said the young woman behind the curtain, throwing herself against her pillows in a pout. “Only cares about his own skin.”
* * *
Birdy was ten years old again and at the Spencerville Fun Spot with her father. Her mother and brother had stayed home. Her brother was sick with something. Rupert was always sick with something back then. The air smelled like fried dough and body odor. Gasoline, too, from the demolition derby that had taken place a few hours before in the muddy arena next to the mini–golf course. It was late and Birdy was getting sleepy. She and her father had ridden all the rides and all that was left was for him to win her an animal to hug on the way home. Almost all the games involved guns of some kind, but there was one, tucked between the Sitting Duck booth and the Deer in Headlights stand, that didn’t. It was called the Frog Prince. Birdy’s father paid fifty cents for the chance to flip rubber frogs at rubber lily pads. The goal was to get the frogs, wet and slippery and many of them missing hands and feet, to hit a pad and stay. A pretty young woman in a tight waitress’s uniform kept the men in frogs. The players were all men. Birdy wondered why. Couldn’t a girl flip a frog just as well as a boy? The pretty woman’s nametag read “Rita.” She was probably in high school or just out of it. When she leaned over, Birdy could see all the way to her bra, which was black and lacy. Birdy wondered if she’d ever look like that, have breasts, own a bra that pretty. Her father’s frogs landed. Every single time. The pretty girl told Birdy’s father he could pick out whatever prize he wanted from the assortment of stuffed animals, black-light posters, and plastic assault rifles hanging above their heads. Birdy’s father said, “It’s up to the boss here,” and Birdy picked out a huge purple dog almost as tall as she was.
“The boss?” the pretty woman said. “Nah, she’s a princess. Beautiful enough to be anyway.”
Birdy blushed with pleasure. No one had ever complimented her looks. Not her mother or her father and certainly not her brother, who liked to make fun of her poochy girl belly and pigeon toes.
“I thought you were the princess,” her father said to the woman. “A princess waiting for her prince among all these frogs.”
“Maybe I am,” the woman said. “Waiting, I mean.”
Birdy’s father laughed, showing all his teeth, even the silver-capped ones in the back. Birdy was ready to go now. She put her hand in her father’s and squeezed.
“I think the princess is tired,” he said.
“Of course,” the woman said. She leaned forward again and patted Birdy on the head. “Sleep tight, Snow White. Don’t let the bedbugs bite.” She winked at Birdy’s father, who bowed gallantly.
Birdy’s father carried both her and the dog all the way to the car. Then he buckled them both into the backseat, kissing Birdy on the forehead and scratching the dog below his chin. When they set off into the night, everything grew dark and soft. It was as if the velvet sky had swallowed the moon. “I love, I love, I love my calendar girl,” her dad crooned from the front seat. “Yeah, sweet calendar girl…”
Birdy felt safe, there in the dark next to the dog. It had been a perfect day and a perfect night. She couldn’t remember ever being this happy, this content and at peace with the world. Her dad steered the car over a wooden bridge and the thwack of the tires over the planks told Birdy they’d be home soon. Ranasack, Ranasack, Ranasack, she sang to herself. All the way back, all the way back, all the way back. Then something went wrong. The car seemed to swerve. Birdy jerked in her seat, heart pounding. A wave of water had washed up over the car and was pouring through the windows. Her father was gone, pulled from the car by the current, and Birdy was all alone with the stuffed dog, left to drown. With her head just above water, she screamed until her lungs ached.
“Wake up,” the woman next to her was saying through the curtain. Her voice was bored but kind. “You’re okay. You’re having a nightmare.”
Birdy woke to the blue walls of her hospital room and the beeping of monitors down the hall.
“Thank you,” she said to the woman.
“Don’t thank me. You were screaming bloody murder. I only said something so the rest of us could hear ourselves think.”
* * *
Wally showed up at Birdy’s door sometime later, bringing with him a stack of old magazines from the Hair Barn and some dry chocolates. He did a kind of sashay into the room in black capris, a camo crop top, and combat boots. He’d painted his lips a throbbing-heart color. He was full of news. There was a curse on Breeder’s Laundromat, he said, and Basketball Juan Cardoza had been questioned about Daisy Gonzalez’s disappearance. Juan would probably be let go soon, though, and as far as Wally knew, there were no solid leads in the case.
“We’re all sort of waiting with bated breath for someone to find her but really these things never end well, do they? Personally I think Benny Bradenton’s to blame but who asks me anything? No one. Anyway, how are you?”
Birdy found it difficult to follow Wally’s rapid-fire dialogue even when she was her best self and she was not her best self at the moment. She’d started shaking when she woke from her nightmare and it only got worse as time went on. Tremors took over her hands. It was hard to hold the chocolate still enough to bite.
“I’m fine,” she said. Then, haltingly, because her tongue had grown thick inside her mouth, she asked him how he and Helman were getting on without her.
“Don’t worry about me, Mom,” Wally said. “I’m fine, too. Actually, I’m thinking of suing dear old dad for emancipation, and then you’ll both be rid of me and won’t that be a burden lifted? But if I do, it’s not about you, okay? Remember that. This is a daddy issue only, a ‘need to be free to be me’ kind of thing.”
Birdy wanted desperately to persuade him against such drastic measures, but her mind was as fuzzy as the cotton that used to swaddle her precious pink pills. The wildfire from earlier had been replaced by an earthquake and a fog, the quake pretty serious on the Richter scale, the fog heavy and low hanging. She managed to say something to Wally about how much she loved him and how he should make sure to eat well-balanced meals, especially at breakfast time, but then she gave up, her teeth chattering and her head swathed in clouds.
“I know, I know,” Wally said. “Breakfast. The most important meal of the day.”
Birdy nodded and her son and the room around him seemed to jump and vibrate like a plucked string.
“I had Jell-O pudding for breakfast!” the young woman behind the curtain volunteered. “Breakfast of champions.”
“That’s nice,” Wally said. He shot Birdy a look like, Why is this woman talking to us?
Birdy smiled at him, or she thought she did. It was hard to know exactly what her face was doing, but she was grateful her son see
med to recognize immediately, without her having to tell him, her roommate’s inherent lack of quality.
“So you said the police have someone behind bars?” the young woman asked eagerly. “For kidnapping that Mexican girl?”
“For now,” Wally said, “but last I heard they’re going to release him. No real proof he had anything to do with it. Personally I think they’re picking on him because he’s an easy target. Poor Basketball Juan.”
Birdy’s roommate scoffed. “I’d save my pity for someone who actually deserves it. Poor Juan? Poor Juan my white twat.”
Wally ignored her and focused on Birdy. It seemed that in addition to gossip, he had a request. “Mom,” he said, “I’d like you to call me Willa from now on.”
Birdy dropped a chocolate in her lap. She tried to pick it up but failed, smearing a streak of brown across the front of her robe. Wally leaned in, grabbed the truffle, and held it up to her lips.
“Willa,” he said. “Willa as in Cather. You know, the writer. As in O Pioneers!? Or My Ántonia? Or how about A Lost Lady? Actually, that one really fits. I feel like a lost lady most of the time.”
So did Birdy. She was a lady. She was lost. And she’d read My Ántonia in high school. But what did a story about bohemian immigrants and Nebraska have to do with her child? Her feet joined her hands in the shaking. The bed began to bounce.
Wally rested his hands on Birdy’s ankles. “Steady there, girl,” he said. “You had to know this was coming.”
Maybe, but she’d hoped it wouldn’t. She thrust her hands under her hips and clenched her jaw. She tried to tell Wally that she was worried about him, that life was hard enough without courting trouble, but it all came out in a jumble of words. Muddy waters. Wally looked pained, fiddling with his shoelace.
“You’re the one who’s always told me to just be myself and that people would love me for who I was,” he said. “If they didn’t it was their problem. Remember?”
Yes, she remembered. She remembered everything about Wally with a clarity that surprised her because in many other areas, her memory fell short. He was born in this very hospital on an unseasonably warm day in February. There were complications—a twisted umbilical cord, a feet-first positioning—and he came out C-section. Hardly breathing. Nearly purple. Birdy’s miracle baby. It had taken her four years to get pregnant and he almost died in the delivery room. When the nurse cleaned him off it was clear he was beautiful, one of the prettiest babies born that year, that same nurse swore. It was his big brown eyes, which he’d inherited from Birdy’s mother, his thick black hair (courtesy of Helman), and his puckered pink mouth. So kissable. And he stayed beautiful all the way through childhood and into adolescence. It was only recently that he’d grown gawky, awkward, pimply. Birdy preferred to think of Wally at eight, milking one of the cows in a bright green field, a swirl of honeybees behind. She had a photograph of that very moment on her nightstand at home, and the charm of it wasn’t just in the fact that Wally was young and sweet. She’d taken that picture when she too could pass for young, when she and Helman were happy, or at least Birdy was, and before she realized it wouldn’t always be that way.
“So?” Wally said. “Will you do it? Call me Willa, I mean. Not Al. Or George. Or Ishmael. Willa. Will-a. Will you?”
Birdy’s limbs would not stop trembling. There were fissures opening up in her skin, leaving in their wake a path of destruction, potholes and water main breaks, collapsed bridges and broken promises.
“Mom? Are you there?”
How to answer him. How to answer her. Wally. Willa. Was he her son anymore? Or was he her daughter? Was she still Birdy Rodgers now Yoder or had ten days in the hospital turned her into Betty the dirty dairy farmer’s wife with nothing to show for herself but small-town scandal and a sexually confused child? Did any of it matter anyway?
“You’re impossible, Mom,” Wally said. “What am I going to do with you?”
Another unanswerable question.
“You need to stop this,” Wally said. “The drinking. The pills. Or you’re going to die and leave me all alone with Dad. Please don’t do that. Can you hear me?”
She heard him and tried to nod, but the world was tipping and she had to grip the sides of her bed to keep from falling off the edge. She thought she saw out of the corner of her eye the woman from the horrible dairy day shuffling by. There was the trucker hat, the beaky nose, the narrow, disapproving eyes. The woman did a double take, stopped in the doorway, hovered. Why was she here? To point out to Birdy just how useless she was? Birdy closed her eyes, put her fingers in her ears. See no evil. Hear no—
“Okay, well,” Wally said. “I’m out then.”
No, Birdy thought. No. Stay. Please stay. But she couldn’t form the words. There was a tsunami between her and her brain, her brain and her mouth. And her son was on some other shore, out of reach.
“Willa!” she cried, but when she opened her eyes, he was gone, the magazines and chocolates and a lingering scent of nail polish remover the only signs he’d ever been there in the first place.
Birdy started to weep into her shaking hands. What kind of mother was she? What kind of woman?
“I wouldn’t worry about your boy,” Birdy’s roommate chirped. “Everybody loves the gays now. I mean, look at that Ellen person. People fucking love her.”
* * *
They pumped her stomach. That was pleasant. Pumped it empty and then hooked her up to an IV and gave her a chalky substance to soothe the pain in her throat. They told her to rest and she did, but not for long because Helman was sitting in the plastic chair again, staring at his hat. His fingernails were dirty and he hadn’t bothered to shave. He had, however, put on his best pair of work pants and a clean white shirt, and his hair was freshly washed.
Birdy’s throat was sore from the tube they’d shoved down during the pumping, but still, she had things to say. Now that Helman was actually here, she didn’t want to waste her chance.
“It’s about time you came to visit.” Her voice came out as a raspy whisper.
“I know.”
“Wally’s been here quite a bit.” Not true, but Birdy didn’t care.
“Has he?”
“He told me he would like me to call him Willa from now on.”
“Willa.” Helman glanced at the roommate’s half of the room. It was empty. The young woman had gone to the cafeteria for lunch, offering to bring Birdy back a sandwich or Jell-O pudding cup, but Birdy declined. She would eat later. “Like the tree?”
“No,” Birdy said. “Like the writer. He also told me he plans to sue you for emancipation.”
“Really?”
Birdy wondered if he’d even talked to their son once since she’d been in the hospital. Helman always was a terrible communicator. He didn’t call to tell her he’d be coming, so, of course, he came at the worst time.
“You should not have brought me here,” she said. She took a drink of chalky stuff and swallowed hard, chasing it with water. “Do you realize I’ve been sharing my room with a stripper? That there is nothing between me and filth but a flimsy canvas curtain?”
“I’m sorry, Birdy,” Helman said. “I really am.”
Birdy did not trust Helman’s demeanor. It was not like him to be contrite. Maybe it was seeing her in such a state. She decided to pile it on. “You should be sorry. Do you realize what you’ve done? You’ve put me in jail. A glorified jail with nurses instead of wardens but it amounts to the same thing. And I’ve been told I can’t get myself out for another two days.”
“I know. They told me that, too.”
“Why?” she asked. “Why did you do this to me?”
Helman stood up and walked to the window, peered out, seemed to study the scene, which Birdy knew from doing the same consisted of a circular drive, a water feature on the fritz, and a cheerless parking lot that stretched to the horizon.
“Aren’t you going to say something?” Birdy asked.
Helman did not turn to look at her. He sta
red straight ahead, hands folded over his belly, so tight and flat in youth but now spilling over a garish bronco belt buckle. He’d left his hat behind on the chair, its bill dented in the center and stained with sweat.
“I’m leaving you, Birdy,” he said.
“Excuse me?”
“I’ve come to ask for a divorce.”
Birdy cleared her throat. She blinked away the pain. “You can’t be serious.”
“I am. Serious, I mean. Don’t make this more difficult than it is.”
“Don’t make this more difficult? Me?” Birdy’s whispers were growing shrill. Mrs. Damish, her favorite teacher at finishing school, had taught her to keep her emotions in check. No matter how ugly or upsetting the situation, ladies were always in control of themselves. They preserved their pride, their dignity, their self-respect, by never allowing others to get the upper hand.
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