“What we need,” Simon said, “is to get someone in there who can get those birds out.” I couldn’t help but think of Old Peep, who, under Dad’s delinquent care, may have suffered before he died. And I was still so wounded by all I had learned during my recent reading spree that no effort to help seemed too small. I agreed with Simon: the birds must be saved.
When a “Now Hiring, Apply Within” sign appeared in the Pet Palace’s window, the crew decided I was the girl for the job. “Look at her, she’s, like, the dream employee,” said Bear, adjusting the daisy behind her ear.
“Yeah, perfectly groomed, sweet, soft-spoken. With her rosy cheeks, who wouldn’t hire her?” said Ptarmigan, lifting his animated hands, which compensated for his lifeless legs, into the air.
“Plus, she’s cute as hell,” added Orca, lowering her fedora smoothly.
“What’s your work experience?” asked Simon. When he found out my résumé began and ended with the Shake Shack, where I had whirred blenders through all four years of high school, he manufactured me a new employment history. It listed an array of pet stores—all of them in faraway Kalamazoo, Michigan, where I was supposed to be from.
“Now go in there and get the job,” Simon said with a slight squeeze of my arm that heightened my usual eagerness to please. The crew quivered with excitement, and then, as was our ritual, we gathered in a close circle, piled our hands one on top of another, and recited in unison—“Humans Enforcing Animal Rights Today!”
Azar was friendly. He scanned my application with unconcerned eyes and hired me immediately. “You seem like a very nice girl, Dolores,” he said, calling me by the alias Simon had created. “I have trouble, such trouble, keeping the good people in here.”
The crew had been right about Azar’s inadequacies as a purveyor of pets. (“This is ninth American business I have run,” he told me one afternoon, staring with solemnity into the bearded dragon’s terrarium. “First pet store.”) During my brief tenure at the Palace, I did my best to compensate for his failings and bring the assorted creatures, along with their varied habitats, into optimal condition. After two weeks of hard work, during which I impressed Azar with my skill in handling the animals, who all scurried in terror from his hirsute hands (and during which my left ovary never got a rest, surrounded as I was by so many doe-eyed dependents), it was finally time for the Operation to execute its plan.
Bumble came into the store, posing as a customer. He had been in several times before, “browsing for a bunny,” he had always said with a saccharine grin.
“Ah! My redheaded friend!” Azar rubbed his palms together. “So good to see you! I have many nice rabbits—er, bunnies?—in now, just came in. Many nice.”
“Wonderful,” Bumble said. “I think I am finally ready to buy.” And that was our code, my cue to begin.
Swiftly, I darted toward the wide double doors at the front of the store. “It’s stuffy in here, Azar,” I said. “I’m going to open these for a while.” The day was dazzlingly sunny. The wild birds outside sang siren songs. The sky was beckoning, the branches of the trees welcoming.
Azar ignored me, as I’d thought he would, so busy was he speaking to Bumble in the sultry tones of a seasoned if unsuccessful salesman. “But this one,” he purred, “ahhh, this one, look at these markings, beauuutiful.” He lifted a rabbit into the air by the scruff of its neck. Its little legs moved helplessly. I tore my eyes away and lurched in a half-walk, half-run toward the birdcages, where dozens of captive chirpers cheered me on. My heart pounded so fast that I, too, felt like a bird—like something nervous and fragile, with fine white bones, and like something expansive and surprising, something that stretched itself open to reveal a sudden and startling beauty.
One by one, I opened the cages. The birds, ten, twenty, thirty of them, emerged in a flurry of orange and cobalt, red and brown. Their wings made a thrilling sound.
Azar let out an uncomprehending cry. He dropped the rabbit into a mound of sawdust.
I was surprised at how readily they shot straight for the opened doors and fluttered up into the blue. They looked so bright, so foreign—like paint strokes of gold and violet and chartreuse—as they flew above the parking lot and into the trees where the common birds waited. I stood by the doors for a moment, mesmerized by their colors in the sun.
Only a few stragglers remained in the store, confusedly hovering and squawking in wonderment. Before Azar had time to open his mouth, Bumble, who I had learned possessed a fondness for high-tech gear, garments, and gadgetry, removed a specially made net with a retractable pole from his backpack. He expertly used the net to catch the lingering birds and release them outside. (He had practiced this technique for weeks with Raven, who had tossed small cat toys into the air for Bumble while she read her favorite magazine, Billiards USA.) All the while Bumble shouted at Azar, “You are an abuser and exploiter of animals and a killer of birds! We are friends of animals who watch when no one thinks we are watching, and act when no one expects we will act!”
I was silent, absorbed in trying to coerce a frightened lovebird out from between two bags of dog kibble. He was part of a family of two, a bonded pair, and I had often noticed how they perched side by side and slept huddled together, their breasts pulsing with synchronized beats. The lovebird’s companion had already flown away.
“What is this?” Azar cried.
“We are Operation H.E.A.R.T.!” said Bumble.
“What operation?” Azar didn’t understand. “I am calling the police!” He was purple in the face. I felt sorry for him, and for the lovebird.
Bumble was impressively adept with his net. “Margie!” he called. “They’re all out! Let’s go!”
“Who is Margie?” Azar yelled.
The lovebird could not be persuaded. “Come on, come on,” I pleaded softly. I was dripping with sweat and could feel my throat thickening with tears. “Your friend is already outside,” I said. “Come on!”
“Margie!” Bumble called.
“Please don’t stay here. Don’t be scared. It’s better out there,” I cooed. The lovebird blinked at me. He wouldn’t move. Bumble’s slick hand clasped mine. He dragged me out of the store. “Run!” he said. I ran, but I left a shard of myself with that lone lovebird who would not leave, and who reminded me of someone.
Bumble and I dove into our waiting getaway car, Simon’s 2002, and Orca gunned the engine. Azar screamed at me from the sidewalk, “You little idiot!” As we drove away, I saw him staring at the sky, slowly turning in circles.
AFTER THAT, I DIDN’T GO HOME for visits with Dad. I just sent notes, or an essay I’d penned for one of my classes (“Radical and Revolutionary: What the Animal Rights Movement Can Learn From Fyodor Dostoevsky’s The Devils”). I spent all my free time with Simon, Annette, and the crew, plotting the next campaign.
4 GAZELLE (Gazella gazella)
I THOUGHT A LOT ABOUT SIMON’S STATEMENT that marriage was like Chinese water torture. He had repeated it several times since the first. Of course, he was so characteristically bone dry when he said it that I could hardly tell if he was serious. The very ridiculousness of the idea of Chinese water torture, a made-up kind of torture said to induce insanity but not really used by anybody, led me to think that maybe he was kidding. (But it was always so hard to tell with Simon. Even when he looked straight into my face and shared the tenderest of sentiments—“When I watched you push your bicycle across that crowded campus quad, I saw beauty all around you”—his eyes had a dark, gemlike impenetrability. While I could see all the things I loved about him in their facets, I could not so easily see his feelings in them.) Still, it stung me a little to have something about which I’d dreamed for so long—union with another human being—spoken of in such a cavalier way. How could the snuggly, side-by-side peace and matching heartbeats of the lovebirds in Azar’s be akin to the annoyance of having drops of water drizzled on your forehead, against your will, one at a time, forever? I remembered the one and only time Dad had spoken to me at l
ength about his marriage to Rasha. Had there been anything torturous about their time together? It was only their being apart, I had always assumed, that tortured Dad.
ONE SMOGGY SUMMER DAY WHEN I WAS SIXTEEN, I wandered barefoot through our house, steeped in the torpor that occasionally overtakes teenagers, the feeling that something is about to happen but it is impossible to articulate just what—the feeling of waiting for life to begin.
Through the open windows I heard the distant buzz of sprinklers, and the closer one of flies, hot and iridescent and hungry. Dad was enclosed in his den, Doral dangling, long fingers wound around his glass of Maker’s Mark with a splash of water. Predictably, I padded into the master bedroom to embark on my ritualistic hunt for relics, which is what I always ended up doing on such slow-motion afternoons.
I didn’t hunt for the type of relics the nuns had always told us about in CCD, not the old alabaster bones of martyrs, or a russet lock of Mary Magdalene’s hair, or a strap from Saint Francis of Assisi’s sandal, or a stolen fiber from the Shroud of Turin. And I didn’t hunt for almost-relics, like the one I had tucked in my top dresser drawer, a single rose petal glued to a paper card printed with the words “This petal touched to a relic of the Little Flower, Saint Thérèse,” with which I had been presented after my first communion. I hunted for Rasha relics.
I turned into the master bathroom and pulled out a shoebox stashed under the sink. It was full of her old beauty supplies. There were several lipsticks. Their waxy surfaces, I had noted during countless previous inspections, were still lined with the prints of her lips. Had she bought them on impulse, I wondered, during a typical toilet-paper-and-toothpaste run to the drugstore? Had she tossed them boldly into her basket in hopes that maybe Champagne Charm or Frosted Fuchsia would supply a spark that may have been missing from what would ultimately be her short sojourn in the suburbs? Had she tried them on alone behind the locked door of the pink-tiled bathroom she shared with Dad, taking slow, private breaths as she judged the effects of their poisonous pigments on her eyes, skin, mood? And had she filled the wastebasket with tissue after tissue streaked with smears of dissatisfaction? Or had she liked the mouth that shone back at her from the mirror? I pulled the cap off one, Peach Fizz, and twisted it so that the shiny stick emerged from its cartridge like a beacon. I waited a few moments, then twisted it back down and replaced the cap. I had often thought about trying on one of the lipsticks, but didn’t want to erase the marks left by her lips with my own.
In addition to the lipsticks, there was a pair of stray hot rollers on which approximately six Beirut-brown strands had snagged and stayed. There were tiny glass bottles of mysterious oils, their Arabic labels faded and frayed at the corners, a three-pack of velvety pink powder puffs with one puff missing, and a sterling silver compact engraved with the words SHE WALKS IN BEAUTY LIKE THE NIGHT. There was a half-used container of Pond’s cold cream that, when opened, revealed the impressions of two fingertips, an unopened box of Pears soap featuring a Gibson girl’s old-fashioned face, and an emery board with the ground keratin of Rasha’s nails still embedded between its minuscule grains. There were a few bobby pins strewn on the bottom of the box. Because they carried no traces of her, I had no rules against using them. I inserted them into my hair to fashion a temporary updo.
Thus adorned, I sat on the closed toilet seat and waited for a feeling of nearness, of completion, to visit me. The only feeling I had was one of limitless longing. It hung over me stubbornly, like the stifling summer air. I took the pins out and let my hair fall onto my sticky neck.
Then I moved back into the master bedroom and opened the drawer of the nightstand on the side of the bed where Dad never slept. I pulled out a picture postcard. The photo had been taken from the sky and featured a cluster of white buildings beside a turquoise sea. “Beirut City” was printed on the image in a decidedly dated font (the letters appeared to have been dashed on with a thick paintbrush in early-eighties-style haste). The message side of the postcard was blank. Instead of putting the postcard back, I slid the drawer shut and carried it away.
Later, Dad saw me using “Beirut City” as a bookmark. He walked down the stairs while I walked up, my eyes flitting over the contents of an opened hardback: Celluloid Sirens: Great Beauties of the Silver Screen.
“Where’d you get that?” he asked with a startled expression. He slowly pulled a smoke from between his lips.
“The library.”
“No, that.”
“Oh. The nightstand by your bed.”
Dad wasn’t bothered by my snooping or my snatching. He only leaned on the stair railing, stared down at the first-floor foyer where several of our shoes lay scattered, and said, “She sometimes missed Lebanon, I think.”
This fascinated me. I almost could not believe that the woman in the photo albums who belonged so entirely to Dad, who gave her dimpled cheeks to the eye of his camera for immortalization, who still lived in half of his divided face (which half I couldn’t be sure), whose hair still clung to curlers beneath the bathroom sink, had ever belonged to another place, and longed for it. “How old was she when she came here?” I asked.
“Oh, twenty-four. Almost twenty-five.”
Had she bought the white dress with the buffalo-shaped belt buckle when she arrived? Was the buffalo the most American thing she could find, a symbol of her new home? Dad was still, but I sensed the possibility for conversation. He kept his Doral out of his mouth, suspended. And he had never, never told me enough about Rasha. I hurried out another question. “Why did she come?”
Like most immigrants, Dad said, she had hoped to find better opportunities. “She’d studied the art of perfumery back home in Beirut. She’d been apprenticed to a master there, an old man who made scents the ancient way, using only natural materials. Your mother was ambitious, and an artist. She always told me, ‘A good perfume is an invisible kind of beauty.’ ” Dad smiled. “When the old perfumer died, your mother made the move to America. She had a cousin here. She brought her kit with her—a beat-up black suitcase filled with a hundred tiny bottles of attars and absolutes.”
I imagined Rasha’s kit, countless corked vials filled with extracts of every plant, bloom, bark, resin, and root in existence. Maybe she had sniffed and caught the essence of everything the earth had ever grown and could combine those spoils in infinite ways to create entirely new types of loveliness. Then I pictured her landing at John Wayne Airport, black suitcase in hand. “How did you meet her?”
She was working, Dad explained, at her cousin’s dry-cleaning business in Anaheim. Dad stubbed his cigarette out on the oak stair railing, leaving a sooty black burn. He did this without realizing. “The day before I was supposed to show my first house, I went to that dry cleaners to drop off a suit. I rang a bell. Your mother came out of a great, crowded collection of clothes on mechanical racks—coats, skirts, blouses and sweaters, all this fabric, silk, corduroy, linen, velvet. And still, she was the softest thing in the whole place. So pretty. Have I ever told you what her name means?”
I nodded, and a gazelle ran from one end of my mind to another. Dad went on. “I don’t know what I said when I handed her my suit, but she laughed. She had tiny sparkles of sweat on her forehead. She was a so golden. She had the sun in her—there were yellow flecks of it in her brown eyes.”
Dad’s facility with fanciful descriptions had served him well at Sunshine Realty, where he could make even the homeliest of hovels sound like a heartwarming hideaway. I wondered if he had first developed this talent while searching for ways to describe the comeliness of Rasha, if he had lain awake nights, lovestruck, composing secret songs about the girl at the dry cleaners. “She was wearing all white that first day I saw her,” he continued, “and every time I came in, which was often. Everything I had in my closet, even blue jeans, went in and out of that place three times before I finally asked her to have dinner with me.
“On our date, she wore a white dress with a brass buffalo belt. She said it was hot in the
dry cleaners and wearing all white made her feel cooler. She said most of the buildings by the sea where she came from were white, but from what she could see the buildings around here were painted all kinds of colors. She said it was a bit quixotic, but I knew she meant chaotic.
“After dinner, we took a walk around this neighborhood”—he extended an arm down toward our front door, on the other side of which sprawled the orderly rows of houses, the lawns (all of them but ours) fertilized to near-fluorescence—“the Tierra de Flores tract, brand new then, where I was selling my first properties. She wanted to see where I worked. We strolled through the half-built houses. They were like skeletons. Some had birds nesting in their beams. Our footsteps echoed on the fresh cement foundations. She took off her shoes and showed me how she danced.”
She was living with her cousin who ran the dry cleaners, Dad said, and sleeping on a couch—though she didn’t sleep much. “She told me she sat at the kitchen table every night experimenting with perfume formulas—or recipes, as she called them. She worked from the time the nightly fireworks show at Disneyland began—she watched it religiously through the kitchen window—until the early morning hours, just before that first slice of light sneaks into the sky. And when she fell asleep she always dreamed of where she wanted to live, in an apartment by the sea, with a white cat for company. ‘There is a Ferris wheel at Newport Beach,’ she told me. So she was saving up for her own place there, and was going to open a little perfumery.
“But one night she told me she loved my eyes.” At this recollection, Dad looked right into my eyes, something he did so rarely it made me shy. “She said, ‘I would love to have a child with you because he would have your eyes, with that green color, and the way the lids swoop down over them’—and she touched my eyelids, Margie!” Dad’s cheeks flushed and his voice shook. “This woman who knew the names of all flowers, who could tell whether wine tasted of strawberries or soil, this woman who danced in her bare feet, she had told me about her child with my eyes.”
The Lovebird Page 4