The Colours of Birds

by Higgins, Rebecca

  “How are your children?” Lucia asked.

  “Oh, they’re all fine, really,” Alice said. “And yours?”

  “They are fine, also.”

  The women sat together quietly. Lucia looked over at the crocus, its green leaves pressed up against the glass. Alice sipped her drink and squinted against the heat sliding down her throat and into her belly. She fiddled with the toothpick holding its trio of olives.

  “Do you need help in the kitchen?” she asked.

  “No, no. It is done.” Lucia stood up.

  “Come into the dining room, everybody,” she said, leading the way into the room next door.

  The round table was laid for four, with glinting silverware as shiny as the front hall and delicate, gold-rimmed china perfectly centred at each place. And finally, Alice could smell dinner: grease, green onions, slick chop suey. In the middle of the table was an assortment of open boxes of Chinese food. Shiny spareribs in one carton and beige fried rice speckled with bits of egg and vegetables in another. Alice sat down within arm’s reach of a box of chicken balls.

  As soon as everyone was seated, Lucia and her husband began digging in. Exchanging a glance, Howard and Alice did the same. Alice spooned a small helping of rice onto her gold-rimmed plate and stabbed a chicken ball with her fork, lifting it out of the box with ease but struggling to drop it onto her plate. Finally, she poked the chicken ball with her finger to dislodge it from the fork. It was ice cold. Howard was already eating and had a strange expression on his face, like when the kids used to make him their peanut-butter French toast on Father’s Day. She reached for the bright sweet-and-sour sauce and poured a dollop onto the edge of her plate. It glowed there like alien blood.

  The inside of the chicken ball was even colder than its puffy fried coating. Alice choked and dipped it back into the sauce to make it go down easier, but the goop was freezing and slimy and only made the whole thing taste worse. She tried some rice, and it too tasted as though it had been waiting on the table for hours. She snuck a glance at Lucia and Angelo, who were passing the cartons between them and cheerfully eating mouthfuls as they did. She checked Howard’s face to see if she was just being picky, if perhaps the food was plenty hot and delicious too. Howard’s face was pinched as he ploughed through his plate, head down. Alice remembered the time they went to the county fair and stopped to watch the contestants in a hot-dog eating competition, pushing the food into their mouths, gulping water to keep from vomiting. Perhaps she was not being picky. Alice managed to choke down the rest of the dry chicken ball and then spent the rest of the meal pushing the rice around her plate between gulps of martini. The martini was getting easier to drink. She wished there was another one.

  They ate quietly, for a while.

  “Did you see there’s a new supermarket opening on Fourth?” Howard asked the table.

  Lucia nodded. “Yes, it’s so close to us; it’s much better.”

  “Who is your mechanic?” Angelo asked Howard, and the discussion of mechanics took the rest of the meal: who charged what, how to get a good deal on a tune-up, whether regular oil changes could be pushed back, where the best coffee was. The husbands’ talk floated over the table, out of reach.

  “Mrs. Come upstairs with me? To see something,” Lucia said.

  Alice followed Lucia out of the room and up the carpeted steps, white too and clean as unused napkins. Lucia went into a room without furniture and glided over to the closet. She opened it and stood back so Alice could see.

  The closet was half the size of the dining room, with shelves lining half of it and the rest devoted to hangers of clothes, many of them covered in dry-cleaner plastic. Lucia pointed to the neat stacks of colour. Leaning closer, Alice saw that they were piles of leather pants: red, sky blue, a startling yellow, bright orange. She had never seen so many pairs of pants in a place that wasn’t a store.

  “Oh my.” Alice did not know what else to say.

  The floor of the closet was covered with pairs of leather boots in red, black, beige, even a green pair. Lucia beamed. She reached in and pulled out a dress sheathed in plastic, which she ripped off and threw back into the closet. She held the dress against her and swayed in front of Alice.

  It was gorgeous, the purple of the crocus downstairs and shot through with silvery thread. As Lucia moved, Alice saw the silver lining of the dress. The hemline stopped well above the knee. It looked like silk. Alice peered closer and saw a price tag dangling out of a sleeve: $798.

  “Please take this.” Lucia’s eyes were darker than usual. She held the dress against Alice. “It is beautiful, no?”

  “It is, Lucia, but I can’t accept it.” Alice tried to keep the wistfulness out of her voice.

  “I know the dinner was not so good. I am a bad cook, and Angelo went to the restaurant to get us the food. It is probably not what people serve here for dinner parties.”

  Alice smiled. “People don’t usually serve dresses instead of dessert, either.”

  “Please, Alice,” Lucia said.

  In the Andersens’ kitchen, Maureen pushed the last bit of her hot dog into her mouth. Still chewing, she rubbed at a mustard stain on the sleeve of her blouse.

  “You’re making that worse, Maureen.” Lorna rolled her eyes, but Maureen was too busy dabbing at the spreading yellow smear to notice.

  Alice swirled her martini and sipped. The gin made her throat warm.

  “Can you believe it?” Lorna said. “Just up and left. At least you got that bottle of wine, Alice.”

  “Just as well they left. Like you said, Lorna, it’s not like they fit in here.” Mary tipped her glass into her mouth and drained it.

  Alice smoothed the skirt of her purple dress and looked out the window into the Andersens’ backyard. Way at the back of the flat, brown yard, she could see a few bright green crocus heads, poking up toward the light, hopeful and out of place.

  Acknowledgements

  Without Helen Humphreys, this book would be a pamphlet, and nobody would be reading it except me. I’ll never be able to thank her enough for reading, editing, and believing in this book. I am indebted also to Gary Draper, the only person to point out that, in fact, books don’t sink. And to my sister, Sarah Higgins, who always cares about the characters and doesn’t mind when I quote myself.

  Thank you to everybody at Tightrope Books, especially Jim Nason and Heather Wood. Thank you both for your encouragement and for your limitless patience with my pestering ways. Thank you Deanna Janovski for your sharp eye, precision, and flexibility, and David Jang for your beautiful cover.

  Thank you so much to Jessica Westhead and Catherine Bush for reading and endorsing this book. Thank you to Hayley Andoff for being a photography genius, and to Christine Cho for her makeup magic.

  Thank you to my friends. Thank you for all of your support in its various forms. Thanks especially to my long-haul loves: Agnes Kowalski, Annie Muldoon, Catherine Koehler, Chris Berwick, Elisabeth Leggett Richards, Erin McElhone, Manuela Popovici and Zuzana Eperjesi. Thank you also to: Kate Henderson, Kelly Noussis, Lori Naylor, Diana Ballon, Rebekah Grayston, Deborah Deacon, Tanya McMillan, Hanne Wenkeler, Rosa Gomez, Caryn Thompson, Mark Fernley, Mary Thompson, Krista Richey, Irma Molina, Jenna Tenn-Yuk, and everybody else who has helped me in a million ways both concrete and abstract.

  Thank you to my family: Andrew Higgins, Alexa Higgins, Kathy and Paul Higgins, the Wills Voogd Contingent (Julie, Gordon, Mattias, and Markus), Harvey Voogd and the rest of the Voogd family. This book is dedicated to my parents, Krystyna and Michael, and to their parents: Margaret, Joseph, Frances, and Boleslaw.

  I’m grateful to the Humber School for Writers’ Correspondence Program, which gave me the opportunity to work one-on-one with an established writer (spoiler alert: it was Helen) and focus on the project that became this book.

  Thank you to Alison Gadsby and Junction Writes (the 2013-2014 crew: Kelly, Kate, Dolly, Chrissi, Jo, Jim, Josh, and Jam). This group of wonderful writers offered careful readi
ng, insightful edits, and ongoing inspiration for early versions of “Windpipe,” “My Dad and Me, and Everybody Else,” “Charlene at Lunchtime,” “What Vern Did,” “Clara and Rosemary,” and “On Walnut Street.”

  Three of these stories were published previously, in slightly different form. Thank you to the folks at the Antigonish Review for publishing “The Colours of Birds.” Thank you also to Mike Landry at the Saint-John Telegraph-Journal for publishing “Everything Inside,” and to the Toronto Star for publishing “The White Stain.”

  There are many people and things that inspired these stories. The movie Pollock (2000) first introduced me to Lee Krasner, and an exhibit at the Nova Scotia Art Gallery sparked my fascination with Maud Lewis. Thanks to all the folks I met in New Orleans. Thanks also to Mary Ching for telling me the story that turned into “On Walnut Street,” and to Lori Naylor for telling me the story that became “The End of Everything Fun.” Thank you to Markus for being in my family, and to Mickey for the Original Joey stories. I’m also grateful for The Golden Girls, Shel Silverstein’s The Giving Tree, the TTC for its myriad of eavesdropping opportunities, and all the weirdos not otherwise mentioned.

  Finally, thank you to Bruce Voogd, for co-creating Vern, for reading stories, for being wise and kind, and for making me laugh every day.

  About the Author

  Rebecca Higgins has lived and worked in Ireland, Honduras, and Brazil. She has a background in social work and has worked in mental health education since 2011. Her short stories have appeared in such publications as the Toronto Star and the Antigonish Review. She lives in Toronto.

  PHOTO: Hayley Andoff