by Bob Tarte
When Victor bit me, I whirled around with the broom, pressing it against his chest and shoving him away. Instead of retreating, he came straight at me and grabbed a beakful of my pantleg. “What’s wrong with you?” I demanded, pushing him harder with the broom. He reeled backward, flapping his wings, flashing his yellow eyes, and charging with outstretched neck. I didn’t strike him with the broom. I used it to slow his momentum as he came at me; then I pushed back, intending to show him who was boss and discourage him from ever attacking again. But he fluttered in the shadows, set his toenails against the cement floor, and launched himself again. Each push from me stoked the fires of his increasing rage, and his emotion ignited mine.
The light from a single overhead bulb gave the barn a theatrical ambience. While the other birds probably didn’t as much as glance up from their food dishes, I imagined that a gallery of hens perched on the stanchions and ducks settled in the straw watched us like the patrons of a cockfight. Both of our standings were at stake. Victor kept coming at me, and I kept pushing him back. Our conflict had begun as a struggle for dominance, more ritual than reality; but from the escalating intensity of Victor’s lunges, I saw that he was now protecting himself from a perceived threat to his safety. And he had read my anger correctly. I would just as soon have grabbed him by the throat if I thought that it would stop him.
The whole time our fight was taking place, a tiny voice in the background clamored against the clatter. At first, I easily blocked it out. My reptile brain generated red noise as I focused on avoiding getting bitten. But finally the words came through with moral clarity. The voice asked, Do you realize you’re having a shoving match with a duck?
I’m not thinking right, I answered. Since my father died, I’ve gotten as nutty as Eileen. And, by the way, have we been introduced?
Interrupting my internal dialogue, Victor came at me from across the floor. I lowered the broom and backed away. He surprised me by breaking off the charge, contenting himself with panting to the air, wagging his tail, and opening and closing his beak. I couldn’t tell if Victor was dancing a victory dance, but somehow I didn’t think so. To my left, Hamilton started hissing, but he bypassed me, waddling up to my opponent and joining him in an elevation of snaking necks.
I loved these ducks. That’s what bothered me so much. For ten years, I had lived closely with animals. I didn’t expect them to act like people and was frequently happy that they couldn’t if they tried. I was patient with them. Guilty about the whole idea of confinement and control, I did my best never to flaunt my advantages of holding the keys to the larder and the cage. Despite my oodles of empathy for them, it had taken precious little to turn me into Elaine’s cousin Elmo.
“Sorry,” I told Victor, who held his spot in the middle of the floor. “Sorry,” I said to the hens and ducks who had witnessed my equivalent of a panting-and-hissing display.
On my way back to the house, I found Linda inside the backyard duck pen. She had set up a plastic chair next to the door and was feeding Lulu dandelion leaves at the end of an outstretched arm. The other ducks stayed away. Goose sisters Liza and Hailey were too shy to accept the food from her hand but bold enough to nibble the belt loops of her jumper. Above the murmur of goose voices I heard Linda singing, “Oh, Dear, What Could the Matter Be.” Everyone seemed happy, and I suspected that the barn birds had already dismissed the kind of squabble that probably occurred among the Muscovies every day. But I was so keyed up, I half wished Eileen would call and sap my nervous energy with a few peewees.
A FOUR-YEAR-OLD Chinese girl met us in the foyer of the Chinese buffet in Ionia and asked us with grave formality, “Would you like smoking or nonsmoking?”
Linda’s back trouble prevented her from sitting for any length of time, so we usually couldn’t eat at a restaurant unless a waitress on roller skates whisked our orders to us as soon as we walked in the door. Buffets were a different matter, since we never had to wait for our food. Along with the expected Chinese dishes, the Peking Happiness surprised the diner with such Cantonese delights as squash, corn on the cob, pepperoni pizza, ham-and-cheese-stuffed mushroom caps, French-fried onion rings, and an inspired sushi roll that substituted a plug of hot dog or dill pickle for the anticipated shrimp or yellowfin tuna.
“We want to be up there,” said Linda, indicating a raised area. I settled in facing Linda and a pair of televisions above the waitress station, and Linda sat facing me and a pair of televisions above the windows. One TV in each pair had the sound turned on. The other used closed captioning, allowing me to read the text of an Aleve commercial while I picked at bamboo shoots.
When Linda returned to our table from the buffet, I noticed that she listed slightly to one side, and I didn’t think it was simply the weight of her plate. Her back pain had flared up again, though she didn’t complain. “Henry Murphy called with the soil test results this morning,” she told me as I marveled at the sheer amount of food on her dish.
“You know, they let you go back as many times as you want.”
“Everything looks so good,” she said, picking up her corn on the cob. “Anyway, he was quite proud of the results. He said that our soil contained zero amount of phosphorus, zero amount of nitrogen, and zero amount of potash.”
“That sounds pretty low.”
Problems with the closed-captioning software caused Tom Brokaw to spew a stream of asterisks, percentage signs, and exclamation points. The glitch matched the language of a heavy man in a tight fitting T-shirt one table away, who indelicately dressed down his grade school son for stuffing himself on desserts rather than entrées.
“He was quite triumphant about it. I said I didn’t think it was possible to have zero phosphorus, zero nitrogen, and zero potash—my gardens wouldn’t be so lush. But he was very insistent that his results were correct.”
“Did you ask him about the blood-alcohol test results?”
Reaching behind her back, Linda extracted an object resembling a serving of uncooked calf’s liver. The gel pack hadn’t come from the store in this distended condition, but it had earned its amorphous shape by being repeatedly plopped down upon, stepped on, and, from all appearances, run over by a school bus. Its original plastic envelope had burst long ago, and Linda had encased it in a series of sandwich bags. She squeezed it a couple of times and announced, “I’ve got to zap my heat pack.”
I was happy that the restaurant offered a self-serve microwave, or she might have had to explain to our four-year-old hostess that she wasn’t smuggling in a bizarre food item that somehow hadn’t made it into the buffet. Too many times I had witnessed Linda handing the visceral-looking pouch to a terrified teenager behind a fast-food restaurant counter and asking him or her to please warm it up.
“I got quite the phone call today while you were at the grocery store,” I said after she’d returned with the gel pack, knocked her lumbar cushion to the floor, dropped the gel pack while picking up the cushion, and finally managed to arrange them both behind her. “My mom called. She lost her purse.”
“Again?”
“She claimed that somebody had come into her house and taken it. When I told her I’d be right over to help her find it, she said, ‘Joan’s here already. I was just wondering if you knew anything about it disappearing.’ “
A large, white, inoffensive non-Muscovy duck appeared on a commercial. “That looks just like Lulu,” Linda pointed out. “She thinks you took her purse?”
“I’ll bet she doesn’t bite people,” I said. “I’m talking about the duck. Joan came on the phone and said she’d found the purse stuck under the couch cushion. Same place she found it the other week.” I gestured toward the thickset man whose sulking son refused to lift his fork. “How’d you like to have that for a family?”
“Did you tell her she needs to keep it in one place?”
“I told her, ‘I’ll put a hook in the front vestibule for your purse, and you’ll always know exactly where it is.’ But she said, ‘I don’t want my purse
out in plain sight. Someone will come in and take it.’ “
“Didn’t one of your sisters say it sounded like she might have dementia?”
I’d heard that suggestion before, and I didn’t care for it. “She’s a little forgetful, and she’s upset about my dad,” I muttered to my plate.
“I didn’t tell you the rest of the Henry Murphy story. I called the DNR and asked them if it was even possible for soil to have zero phosphorus, zero nitrogen, and zero potash. They told me absolutely not. You wouldn’t even get numbers like that with sand, so I called Henry back and told him that he must have done the test wrong, but he wouldn’t listen. He said his test was right and our soil needed lots of work.”
I raised my face from my stir-fry. “We’re not using him for anything anymore, are we?”
Linda shook her head. “But I think we should send the poor guy twenty dollars. Just for doing the test.”
I WANDERED INTO the backyard in more of a mental fog than usual. Instead of giving the chickadees that hung acrobatically from the bird feeder the attention they deserved, I watched an epic internal newsreel about my mom, worrying what would happen to her in the absence of my father’s stabilizing presence. Trying to deal with all these brand-new concerns, I had begun feeling like a duck out of water myself. The door of the girls’ pen was cracked open and a body sat on Linda’s green plastic chair. Through the curtain of preoccupation, I did a zombie-stagger down the hill and called listlessly, “Hi, sweetie.”
Kate’s face flashed me a frown; then she laughed. “Your wife said it was okay.”
I caught myself blushing. “Sorry. I was talking to a goose.”
She cradled Lulu in her arms. “He didn’t seem to recognize me at first. Did you, Louie-Lou?”
I was embarrassed again as I noted that Lulu’s blanket, bear, and mirror were wet and covered with dirt. “She’s been a little confused, but I think she’ll do okay,” I said, though I had strong doubts about the duck’s progress. Kate nodded.
“Did you take the day off from work?” I blurted out without weighing the intrusiveness of my question. “I only work mornings,” I added hastily. “Unless you count what I do here as work.”
“I’m an attorney with a realty company, and the nonlawyers are at a seminar,” Kate answered. For a flash, I could see her as a lawyer—she did have a sharp-boned, intelligent face—but Lulu’s nervousness distracted me. The duck quacked and made a move to hop off Kate’s lap. Kate covered the duck’s head with one hand and petted her back with the other.
Although Kate continued talking about her job, I missed the meaning behind the words and concentrated on the sound of her voice instead. Her nasal twang reminded me of the convenience-store worker who had wished me good morning a few minutes ago through the speaker on the gas pump as I filled my car. I knew the circuit worked both ways, but I hadn’t yet reached the point in my life where I was comfortable answering a gas pump’s greeting. I also had a difficult time separating Kate from Eileen’s foolishness, which wasn’t exactly fair on my part. But she had hidden a large white duck in an apartment bathroom.
“She’s having a hard time, isn’t she?” Kate asked me.
Eileen’s unfathomable motives even affected how I viewed Lulu. I felt sorry for the poor creature, who spent much of her day pacing and calling for the owner that she considered to be her mother. Three days was an eternity in duck time, however, and I had expected her to accept her duckness and join the flock by now. While I was glad that Lulu didn’t act like Victor, I wished that she possessed a little of his grit.
“She’s eating well,” I assured Kate. “And we did see her in the pool a couple of times. Nobody’s picking on her, either. Her size intimidates the other ducks, and Liza and Hailey aren’t the least bit aggressive.”
Lulu started squirming again, Kate let her hop off her lap, then stood up and joined me outside the pen. I shut the door, fastening both latches and wondering whether my mom had found the house keys that she’d reported lost. Instead of running up to the fence to see where her owner had gone, Lulu wandered over to the girls preening near the back of the pool. She looked so much like our white Pekin Richie, who lived in the barn, that I wished I could put the two together. For all his gentleness, however, Richie was too much of a ladies’ man to trust with the gals.
“I can tell a definite difference in her,” Kate told me sadly. “She’s already left me, even if she doesn’t fully realize it yet. I’m glad I didn’t bring Geri.”
“No, I guess that wouldn’t have been good,” I agreed. Her perceptiveness impressed me. I had paid too much attention to Lulu’s larger behavior and missed the more subtle signs that she was starting to fit in. “It’s tough to lose a friend,” I told her as a chickadee called his wide-awake song from the roof of our milk house.
CHAPTER 5
Wild Things
For the first time in my forty-eight years of life, I found myself wishing that my mother was more like a duck as I watched Lulu quickly get over the loss of her “mom.” Understandably enough, my mother remained a long way from reconciling herself to losing my dad. After having tea with her and trying on a few of my father’s sweaters, I decided to check with Mrs. Teany, across the street, to determine whether she was helping or hindering the situation.
I felt stupid standing on Judy Teany’s porch and even worse when she insisted that I sit in a ridiculously large recliner in the living room. As its great striped bulk engulfed me, I whisked back forty years in time to the house then owned by the widowed Mabel Kuipers and my faux-pas asking, “Why did Mr. Kuipers die?” as my feet dangled from her couch. I could have phoned Judy instead of dropping by, but I needed to figure out whether she was acting strangely or my mom had been making things up. Her alleged remark about eating in the basement to avoid seeing the light in my mom’s kitchen nettled me, as did my mom’s recent claim that Mrs. Teany had walked into the garage and walked out with my father’s grass seeder without asking if she could borrow it.
“Would you care for a Little Debbie cake?” Judy asked. “We have maple cream sandwiches.”
I thanked her, no. “Mr. Teany’s gone?”
“Don went out to mail a letter. I hope he’s okay.” She lifted the clock from the coffee table, then set it back down on its well-worn spot on the fabric-covered mat. “You never know what might happen,” she sighed with the arch of a penciled eyebrow.
I didn’t remember the dark woodwork throughout the room, though it may only have seemed dark in the midday indoor dusk. She’d bunched the sheers so tightly across her curtain rods, they could hardly be called sheers any longer. They were more like paper towels soaking up the sun. This was, I realized, the first time I’d ever spoken to Judy without my mother’s presence. And except for an exchange of pleasantries at the funeral home, this was the first time I’d spoken to her at all in a decade. We had a lot of catching up to do.
“Maybe he was stopping for shrimp,” she concluded.
“Do you ever go to the Wooden Bridge Fish Market? Up on Plainfield.”
“Oh. I thought I heard a car door.” After a moment, she looked at me expectantly.
“The Wooden Bridge Fish Market.”
She smiled as if I had complimented her.
The problem with determining whether Judy had run off the rails was that nearly everyone struck me as provisionally sane at best. I too readily read a character disorder into Judy’s display of a teapot-shaped wall plaque with a hanging wooden tab that could be flipped to indicate whether GRANDMA was HAPPY or UNHAPPY. I found myself wishing that my sister Joan could have tagged along to provide balance. My dad would have made me laugh. A year earlier, he had told me, “That Judy Teany has been sending money to televangelists. I think she’s afraid of the end of the world.” This definitely struck me as loopy, but I couldn’t link neurosis with pilfering gardening implements—otherwise my barn would be swollen with stolen lawn mowers.
Our halting conversation dramatically improved when my dull com
ment about how the neighborhood had changed over the years led to a good story about my dad. “I came home from the bank one day and saw your poor father trapped by Mr. Brink while he was trying to wash his car,” Judy told me. Brink was the barely coherent old bore from the next block who had made a habit of sneaking up on my father while he was doing yard work and informing him, “That’s how I got my start,” as the launching point for a rambling discourse about his sales career.
“I was so sorry for him,” Judy said. “Your dad was way too nice to tell the old coot to buzz off, like Don would have, so I rushed inside and called your mom and told her, ‘Bette, stick your head out the front door and tell Bob he’s got an important phone call.’ He was so pleased that I’d rescued him, he invited us over for a highball later.”
“I remember that,” I laughed. “From then on, we sort of kept watch on him and always called him in when Mr. Brink surprised him. But he didn’t like it if we made it really obvious, even though Mr. Brink was too far gone to catch on. He started talking to bushes not long after that.”