In Search of the Perfect Singing Flamingo

by Tacon, Claire;

  It’s almost eight and Starr’s support worker will be gone by the time we reach the condo. Starr’s come to and is ready to be home, in her pajamas, comfortable. Fast food isn’t good for her because it’s salt-loaded, but at this point Wendy’s salad and fries is our best bet. I offer her my free arm as we walk to the condo elevator.

  Della comes straight out of her room when she hears us and gives Starr a hug. “I was worried about you,” she says. “I thought you might have been in a car crash.”

  “No.”

  Her Pikachu nightie has ridden up above the waistband of her matching print boxers. She releases her box braids from their Pikachu scrunchy then loops them back through.

  “Sorry for getting Starr back so late,” I say, and Della gives me a hug too. The three of us have spent a lot of time together, even before they were roommates.

  Della loops her fingers through my sister’s and Starr smiles at the contact.

  Starr changes while I unpack for her, gathering up her laundry for Mom’s hamper. My sister’s added some photos to the bulletin board since I was last here. Posing with Levi on his last day, both of them making peace signs into the camera. A selfie from our trip to the Koreatown karaoke bar – Starr vamping on the red couch, kissy lips splintered by the rotating magic ball light. On her dresser, two banana peels are staining a paperback and I toss them out in the kitchen without saying anything. Starr doesn’t need criticism from me, especially not today.

  In the living room, Starr is stretched out on the couch, too pooped to sit at the table. “Wine?” she asks.

  I know from Mom that there are mini bottles of champagne in Starr’s room, but she’s not supposed to drink them in the common areas because Della’s parents are so strict. Again, I don’t want to step into the role of parent but I also don’t want to spark a fight. I bring Starr her food on a tray and wait to see if she asks again.

  She picks at her fries as Della sits at the far end of the couch, flipping through the TV channels. “Grey’s Anatomy?”

  “No.”

  “Friends?”

  “No.”

  “CSI: Miami?”

  “How about a movie?” The grease on my potatoes is starting to congeal, the insides cold and starchy. If it wasn’t going to be such a long night, I wouldn’t bother. I text John to let him know that I can be back on set in an hour – the Gardiner should be pretty clear by now. The couple was able to transfer enough money to buy materials, including a beam and telescopic jack post that the crew is currently pouring a foundation for. They’ll work for another two hours to try to get the wall framed, whatever they can finish before eleven.

  “I got one on the weekend,” Della says, off to her room for it. It’s a copy of Bend it Like Beckham, Blockbuster surplus. “Dad got it for me because I was so worried. We thought you were in a car crash.”

  “I went to Chicago.”

  “Why?”

  Dad clearly neglected to tell Della’s parents he was taking Starr out of town. I wonder if he knew before we had him over for dinner, if that Franny Feathers was why he was so resistant to the renovation. There’s a darker question too – why he’d rather buy more Funhouse scraps than help us with IVF.

  Sometimes, like tonight, I get an acute ache to have someone else in my situation to call up.

  When I was a kid there were sibling meetings at the conventions where we sat around a circle and made collages that were supposed to represent our life. Big feelings compressed into glue and ripped up magazines. It’s not that kind of shoulder-to-lean-on that I’m looking for.

  My life is a countdown to responsibility and it would be nice to have role models. Being a sister is an easy dynamic: friendship and advocacy. It’s comfortable for Starr to tell me what she wants, for me to put down boundaries. But what happens when that gets mixed with guardianship? When I’m the one who drops everything because she’s had a crisis at work. Or deals with the simple atrophy of going forward. Day program works for now, but will Starr always be interested in the same rotation of arts, crafts and life skills?

  Dad complains that I’ve been in a rush, to get married, to have kids. But why not? There’s a strong chance that he and Mom will need supportive care at the same time Starr does. I’d rather start a family before the pressures of senior and sibling care compound. The same things that weigh on him, I’m carrying too.

  Della pulls the collar of her nightie down and shows Starr a bright red hemp necklace with yellow and purple beads. “Look what I made.”

  “It’s beautiful,” I say, expecting Starr to concur.

  She looks like she’s going to cry again. “I was going to make one. Purple and light blue.”

  “We made extra for the charity,” Della says.

  “I wanted to make a pink bracelet. Like the breast cancer ones.”

  “Bernice said it was so popular, they might do it again next year.”

  Starr pushes her tray farther down her lap and starts picking the cuticle on her left thumb. “It’s not fair.”

  “Bernice was worried about you too.”

  “Dad promised I’d be back in time. Why would he promise that? It was a terrible day.”

  I shift Starr’s tray with its untouched salad and half-eaten fries to the coffee table. While she’s on the brink of another upset, there’s no way I can leave. I text John to let him know I’ll connect to the office remotely, then offer Starr one of her favourite things, a carry-over from when we were little. We start up the movie and Starr leans back against my folded knees. I comb my fingers through her hair, pausing every so often to smooth the puffed curls back into ringlets.

  “That feels nice, Melanie.”

  Again and again, I rake my nails along her scalp.

  HENRY

  BACK WHEN STARR WAS IN ELEMENTARY SCHOOL, ONE of her teachers looked at Kath and me after the Christmas concert and said, “It’s nice that you two are on the same page.” The woman meant well, but I wondered if she thought there was some sort of manual for this. Couldn’t she see that we were only doing what worked for as long as it worked? There isn’t a blueprint in the world for what our life is. It’s why I quit the free counselling after a while. You’ve got simple, focused problems – my husband cheated, my kid stole something – sure, see a therapist. Kath and I, we could spend a month’s worth of appointments just breaking down the variables. You work with a counsellor, it’s like training to be a trench soldier. Then your enemy’s dropping canisters of chlorine gas. You learn to piss in your handkerchief and then it’s mustard. There’s no preparation. Our problems won’t hold still.

  Before the weekend, Starr’s job was the prime stressor. Now I’ve put her ability to travel at all in jeopardy. Already cruises are limited to drivable ports because she’s unwilling to fly. What’s left if she’s too afraid to cross the border? I think of all of Kathleen’s training, hours spent in repetitive play, handing over tickets, pretending to board the gangway, practicing safety drills. All that careful sandbagging.

  When I get in from work, Kathleen’s garment bag is draped over the hall bench and, in the kitchen, there’s the plastic shell from a grocery rotisserie chicken. The dining-room table’s set, a notepad and pen next to each plate, as if we’re gearing up for a raucous night of Pictionary.

  I’d toyed with the idea of meeting her train at Union, but Kathleen wouldn’t want a scene in front of her co-workers. Now there’s no grand gesture I can come up with. I catch her walking up from the basement, Starr’s hamper crumpled over her arm.

  “I was supposed to do that on Sunday, wasn’t I?”

  Her kiss hello is more cheek than lip. Even though I know she’s likely furious, I’m so happy to see her. “Kathleen,” I reach for her arm. “I’m incredibly, incredibly sorry.”

  “Henry, I haven’t had time for a proper meal in days.” She’s in her work clothes, her pencil skirt bunchy from the train. “You can hang onto your guilt until we’re at the table.”

  Kathleen isn’t the kind of perso
n who fishes with barbed hooks. Usually, if she’s going to punch, you’ll see the windup.

  “Can you pull dinner out of the oven?”

  “Sure.” I reach between the tipsy slats of our wine rack, a fortieth birthday gift from her mother, another item in our house that needs replacing. “Malbec’s the one you like these days, right? If you want to get changed, I can bring it up to you.”

  “This needs dry cleaning anyway, so I might as well eat in it.”

  She pre-empts my obedience, reaching for the oven mitts and extracting a tray of potato wedges. “The coleslaw is in the fridge.”

  I scoop the mayonnaise and cabbage into a ceramic bowl because I know she won’t want anything on the table that could leave a grease ring. Just to be safe, I put a placemat underneath.

  We sit kitty-corner to each other and help ourselves separately. I offer to pass her a drumstick, but she insists on reaching for it herself, pinching her waist against the table.

  “Well,” I say, “how was the conference?”

  She leaves her fingers resting along the edge of her cutlery and looks at me dead-on. “Which part?”

  “You said that food was a big seller.”

  Kathleen abandons her knife and fork. “Can you imagine how worried I was? Della’s parents called yesterday, as well as the agency, all wondering where Starr was. This was at the start of my day, when there was still eight hours of smiling at clients, trying to interest them in fleece hoodies, leather notebooks, spring-loaded corkscrews.” Her hands flutter up, split birds. “It was Melly who filled me in, long after you should have called. A text message is insufficient.”

  “The border, that was the most scared I’ve ever been. To see Starr like that –”

  “No. You don’t get to spill it all out. I’m not in the confession booth.” She glances around herself, emphasizing the cubicle’s absence. “You don’t get ten Hail Marys as penance.”

  “I didn’t think the trip would play out the way it did.”

  “You bash ahead with your good intentions and then I end up feeling sorry for you. Poor Henry, he’s had a hard enough time without me piling it on. Starr was so worked up today, she didn’t even want to go to the grocery store.” She takes a long drink of the wine. The red tastes awful with the chip batter but she doesn’t seem to notice. “You act like you and Starr are in a club that no one else is invited to.”

  She lets it hang, the comment’s sting.

  “The thing is, I could yell at you. You could apologize and I could forgive you, like always. We’d move on and I’d be left tying up all the loose threads. But this time, instead of us having the same old argument, I’m going to skip to the part that I need you to be on board with.” She gestures to the notebooks. I pick up the pen, grateful for the movement’s distraction, a student awaiting dictation.

  “Della’s parents want to meet. You’re going to be there, ready to grovel out all the remorse they’ll take about the weekend because we can’t afford to alienate the only people who are a reasonable prospect for a roommate for Starr.”

  It’s also on me to set up an appointment with the agency to look into new employment options for Starr. Mondays and Fridays work best for Kath, but it will have to be after day program.

  “Insist on the earliest opening, we want to get the ball rolling.”

  “Anything else?” I smile at my wife, trying to project compliance.

  Through with pragmatics, Kath drops her gaze to the gap between the table leaves. She starts to speak but pulls back into herself, the muscles in her face tense. When she inhales, her mouth pries open, like she’s panting from exertion. Kath swallows down the gasp, closes her eyes and breathes out, smoothing her cramped brow lines.

  I’ve miscalculated, forgotten how soft she is behind the shield of efficiency. Sometimes with someone like Kath, it’s hard to predict when she’ll need you, to remember that she needs you at all.

  “All of this,” she asks, “for another machine?”

  The neighbour pulls into his drive on his Suzuki crotch rocket. Kathleen turns briefly toward the noise and then rights herself. We’re left not meeting each other’s eyes as we listen to the muffler sputter. I stare at the three pots of orchids on the hutch, a gift for Kath’s last birthday, one each from her girls, me. All that’s left are the brown, hollow stems clipped to the supports above the twin leaves. The flowers were bagged off with the municipal compost months ago, but we’re still on a strict quarter-cup-a-week watering schedule. Starr read all about it on the Internet.

  “Franny Feathers is Starr’s favourite.”

  “Honestly, I could just scream at you.”

  “Go ahead. You wouldn’t be out of line.”

  “I want to. I’m not going to.”

  “I deserve it. And you might feel better.”

  “Now’s not the moment to be charming.” Kathleen isn’t interested in blowing off steam. She doesn’t have time for wasted energy. “Have you even asked Starr what she wants?”

  “I ask her all the time.”

  “No. You tell Starr what you think she wants and then you ask if she agrees. Do you want to go to Frankie’s today? Do you want me to come pick you up? She loves you so much, she’d say yes to a death metal concert with no earplugs.”

  “I listen to her.”

  “You know why I don’t mind when she gets mad at me? When she tells me to butt out or asks what kind of mother I am? Because it means she’s sticking up for herself. I take the hits because it means she’s got enough self-esteem to make demands.” Kathleen bangs her palms down on her thighs, too angry to stop for air. “Starr wants to have a job, to be helpful. She wants to live with Della. That’s why we’ve spent all this time building this situation for her. Sure, she had a bad day at the catering company.”

  “It was more than a bad day.”

  “She was able to take the bus there on her own and she liked the driver on the route. And, for the most part, she liked what she did at work and she got on with the receptionist next door. She had a roommate without parents who are pissed off with us.”

  “It was more than a bad day.”

  “They could have moved her around. Things could’ve gone back to where they were. But you go in and blow it up. You come up with one solution and then hold onto it so tight that you convince yourself it’s the only solution.”

  “I just want her to be happy.”

  “You think I don’t want that for her?” Kathleen scrapes the tears off her cheeks.

  “The world is just too damn cruel.”

  “You think it isn’t cruel to other people? You think it isn’t cruel to Melanie too?”

  “What the hell does Melly have to do with it?”

  “You expect Starr to lead a life that’s not sustainable.” Kath stands and starts to gather up her plate, then she drops it back on the table. “We’re going to die, Henry. And when we’re not around, if Starr hasn’t learned to cope, to build a life with whatever supports that needs, then what’s going to be left for her? You think you’re the only one who loves her. And you think you never hurt her. But you do. You hurt me too.”

  I sit at the table a long time, tracing the sound of my wife’s footsteps, the soft thud of her heel on the carpet.

  Back in the ’90s when the girls were cutting up National Geographics for school projects, I found an article on antique automatons. I’d come across some of them before – The Turk, a German doughnut eater, a harpsichord player with a heaving chest. But there were designs from even earlier, a boat from the thirteenth century with a floating orchestra, invented to amuse kings. I came across the clipping again a few years ago and gave it to Kath, saying, “We’re royalty.” She wasn’t convinced that our Funhouse castoffs were part of a long, noble tradition.

  I think about those older automatons, their show of independence. The careful orchestrations of spontaneity and their inability to stray from the prescribed course. Penned into combinations of a dozen, two dozen movements. This note, that note
. Head up, shoulder left. It’s not what I want for my daughter.

  Our field trips, our playing hooky, I’d thought they were ways to break those strings. Loopholes in the monotony. I don’t like to think that Kath’s right, that I’m depriving my daughter of the skills she needs to construct her own course. That without struggle, perseverance, her world will shrink and shrink in possibility. The boundaries of her life slowly constrained by a neighbourhood, a house, a room.

  DARREN

  I KNEW IT WOULD BE A FIGHT. BUT I DIDN’T EXPECT something out of the Middle Ages with me, the accused, shaved and bound in stocks while my parents played the role of angry townspeople throwing onions. Two hours sitting on the couch while they blew hot air at me. If I had a nickel.

  They kept circling round like talk-show hosts trying to stretch another two minutes until the commercial break. What kind of girl? Who is this Henry? Why can’t you be more responsible like Jeremy? No mention of my injuries and who was at the other end of the fist.

  When my mother said that lying to protect a friend is different, I snapped. “Well, I wish Jeremy was your son too. He needs a family business because no one else is going to hire him.” I added some other things, like how they have no idea how little money he makes with the vitamin scheme. How, yes, he’s got a nice girlfriend, but he cheats on her all the time. Of course, all they heard was the family business part.

  “Our family business is so beneath you?” my mother asked. After it’s paid for the roof over my head, all the food I eat, the crappy Value Village clothes I insist on wearing. That’s when they decided enough is enough, time to send me to my room. Don’t come down until we say. They’re drafting a new world order and I’d better be prepared to accept it.

  Now that I’m on lockdown, my parents are working from home. Yesterday, my dad set up a temporary office at the dining-room table and they’ve had all their calls forwarded from RE/MAX. We haven’t been talking much, or at least I haven’t been talking much. My mother has been doing a lot of lecturing and my dad has given me Oscar-worthy side-eye. They’re not even sure that I should be moving into residence because they don’t think they can trust me. Never mind that I’m legally an adult and could be out on my own. They seem to think I’ll be living here until I’m thirty, obeying a set of rules only slightly updated since I was twelve.