The Book of Dead Birds

by Gayle Brandeis

  Darryl and I have been spending a lot of time together, but we are taking it slow—my choice, I’m afraid, not his. I love being near him, I love kissing him—the warm wet rush of it—but whenever he puts his hand on the front of my shirt, or high on my thigh, I clench like a fist. My whole body clamps down. I can’t bring myself to put my own hands anywhere but his back, his face, his hair. I tell him I’m sorry again and again—I can’t seem to stop myself from saying it. He’s patient, but I can tell he’s frustrated.

  Emily is doing much better now. She came out of her coma after a couple of days. The doctors were worried about brain damage, but as soon as she woke up, she made a huge stink, demanding that someone bring one of her negligees from home; no way was she going to be caught dead in a hospital gown. After Emily started her physical therapy, Frieda showed up with the Miss Tomato tiara and sash and makeup kit; she glammed Emily up and pushed her around the hallways of the hospital; Emily waved from the chair as if she were queen of the parade. She’s the same old Emily, pretty much. Her speech is a tiny bit slurred, and she seems to drag her left foot a little, but overall she’s doing much better than anyone expected. I told her I’ve forgiven her; it seemed like the right thing to do, although part of me feels like I should have thanked her—Darryl never would have known how I really felt, I never would have known how I really felt, without that little chemical nudge. She says she doesn’t remember why I would need to forgive her, says she doesn’t remember the rave at all, and drugs? Whatever would she be doing with drugs? Her memory seems fine otherwise, for the most part, although she says she doesn’t remember the attack. She insists she was hit by a car, but I don’t know how even she could convince herself that a car would leave finger marks on her throat.

  The birds are doing much better, too; the botulism seems to have run its course. We find very few dead birds now, and the pelicans that survived have all been rehabilitated and released. The out-of-state workers have gone back to their home posts. The bird hospital is eerily empty, the incinerator silent and cold. Bird organs have been shipped off to research facilities. The statistics people are firming up their calculations. The death smell is slowly fading away.

  Now that I don’t have to do my route as often, I find myself with more time to work on my mother’s story, to fiddle around with the tapes I’ve been compiling. I bring my sound equipment to Darryl’s house and play with it with my headphones on while he does his paperwork. It feels so easy being there with him, working side by side. It feels so easy until he reaches for me. I look at his bed, his fingers, and my mind flares, but my body can’t seem to catch up.

  “Ava, it’s okay to feel good,” he tells me, as I pull away from his hand yet again. I bite my lip to keep from crying. No one’s ever said this to me before. I certainly haven’t been able to say it to myself.

  “You feeling good isn’t going to hurt your mother.”

  Adrenaline shoots down my legs, a cold river.

  “Think about it,” he says. “She had such a rough time. You don’t have to. She probably wants you to feel good, don’t you think? Wouldn’t she want that for you? I know I do…” His fingers trace the inseam of my jeans.

  “I’m sorry, Darryl…” I can still taste his mouth—rich and dusky as cedar—inside mine. I can still taste my mother’s sorrow, my own contribution to her pain. I want to chase her out of my head, but it’s like she’s rooted there.

  “If you don’t want to be here, just tell me, Ava. You don’t have to humor me along.”

  “It’s not that,” I tell him. “I want to be here. You know I do. Just give me some more time, okay?”

  He kisses the top of my head and walks off to the bathroom, a little hunched over. I know he is going to try to will his arousal away, maybe touch himself to relieve the pressure, and I feel so guilty, but I just can’t go there with him, not yet.

  I keep missing my mother’s calls. She calls to tell me she saw some of the pelicans being released at Casa Cove, dozens of them being ushered out of dog carriers, unfolding their wings, taking to the sky. She calls to tell me I have been offered a job—a temporary one, a well-paying one—as a Foley person for an animation studio project in Los Angeles. She leaves the number on the answering machine. I haven’t called them back yet. It makes sense to take the job—my savings are not deep enough to support me much longer—but, much to my surprise, I’m not sure I’m ready to leave here.

  I finally call my mother to give her Darryl’s number in case she needs to reach me in an emergency. “I’m not sleeping there or anything,” I tell her. “I’m just spending more time there now.”

  I am prepared for her to give me a lecture, to say “Chosim haseyo”—“Be careful,” like Kane always used to squawk at me—but she just says “He a nice man” before she hangs up. Her time with him in the bird hospital must have impressed her. I don’t think I’ve ever heard her use the terms “nice” and “man” together before in my life. When I exhale, I feel like it’s a breath I’ve been holding a long, long time.

  James had lost his virginity to Helen their wedding night. Helen pretended to, too—she cried out like she had a hymen to break. She had a hard time acting inexperienced; she was tempted to pull out her bag of tricks, ask him if he wanted anything kinky, offer herself like clay or mud, not porcelain.

  It almost annoyed Helen how grateful James was for her. When he stroked her inner arm or her neck like it was a marvel of nature, she wanted to swat his hand away. Helen was grateful for the fact that he never lasted very long—five minutes at the very most. Less than a minute the first time.

  James was adamant about having a baby, so when Helen pretended like her period was late a couple of weeks after they were married, he was ecstatic. She was glad she wasn’t that far along when they met—she wouldn’t have too much to explain when she started showing earlier than she should have. James was more involved with the pregnancy than Helen was. If Helen had laid an egg, which she would have much rather done, James would have been the one to keep it warm.

  Helen ate eggs, though, one after another—hard-boiled, fried, scrambled. Her husband was thrilled—a good source of protein, good Western food for the growing baby. She never told him she had heard her mother advise a pregnant neighbor to not eat eggs—they slip the spine right out of the baby’s body, her mother had said, so the baby is born floppy, no backbone to support it; the baby will not live long. If the baby were born strange, maybe James wouldn’t notice the color of its skin. Although she normally didn’t eat bird flesh, Helen asked her husband for the money to buy duck meat—her mother had said it would fuse the baby’s extremities. He was tickled by her gourmet wishes but told her it was too costly. “I’ll bring you chicken,” he said. “Everything tastes like chicken anyway. And it’s cheap.”

  He came home the next day with a bag full of chicken thighs and a scrapbook, so that Helen could keep track of how many calories she ate each day, how many vitamins, and, later, so she’d have a place to paste in baby pictures and note first smile, first words. Her first impulse was to rip out the pages, but she swallowed that down and pushed the book under the bed. She felt the blank paper wait underneath her, silently taunting her when she tried to sleep, when James crawled on top of her large belly. She felt the pages daring her to write. She felt herself fill with words, new jagged English words, words she could never say to James. One day, when James was on duty, she spread the pages open like wings across her lap. She found a new place to hide the book, under the ironing board, where she knew he would never look. She let the words spill…

  Bird fall out of nest. Baby.

  Find on sidewalk, on way to commissary (milk).

  No feathers, eyes purple with skin cover.

  Pink yellow body to see inside. Heart stopping.

  Big head, neck bent bad, little wing open.

  No want to touch it. Leave there. Walk home

  other way.

  Sun, friend Sun, neck bent bad same way,

  purple all ar
ound. Sun, where they take you?

  You fly away? You go over wall?

  White husband drive silver plane, make me

  drink milk milk milk.

  Dark baby flutter inside.

  Helen knew the baby’s father was black, although she wasn’t sure which black man in particular. She hoped that the baby would favor her skin color, that it wouldn’t be too dark. Some of the men she serviced had lighter skin than she did, freckled yellow, honey brown. One man had even been an albino, his skin chalky, his afro a frizzled, jaundiced-looking white. Maybe it was his baby. Comments from James had made it clear that he did not like black people—niggers, he called them, darkies, spades, even ggum-doongi. When James prayed for the baby to be healthy, Helen prayed for it to not be black.

  While she was pushing the baby out, Helen went crazy. The baby got stuck, and she had to push for over an hour. Things flew out of her mouth she couldn’t control. “I suck you, ten dollar,” she yelled. “You put it in my asshole?” “What you want? You want good time?” She couldn’t stop. A nurse tried to reassure James that women said the strangest things during labor, it wasn’t her talking, it was the pain, but he sat, blanched even whiter, on a chair next to the bed, dumbfounded, his hands in his lap. He had held her hand the whole labor until she had screamed out, “I suck that big black cock? You put that big black cock in me?” and he dropped her hand like it was a pile of dog shit.

  Then the baby was born black, and Helen watched James’s lips press themselves into a thin blue line. She watched his hands clench and unclench. She watched the warmth of his gray eyes melt down into steel. He didn’t say another word, got up, left for three days without calling. When he came back after the hospital called him to come get his wife and baby, he showed up stubble-faced, beer on his breath, his clothes rumpled. Helen held the baby wrapped so thoroughly in blankets, her face was engulfed in deep layers of cotton. Helen hoped the white cloth would reflect off the dark face, lighten the baby, but if anything, it accentuated the contrast.

  James pushed the wheelchair down the hallway with such force, Helen thought her episiotomy stitches would split open, thought the baby would fly out of her arms.

  “Sir, it’s regulation that hospital personnel push the wheelchair,” said a young black nurse.

  “Fuck off,” James grunted, and ran the rest of the way. Helen closed her eyes and pulled the shrieking baby close to her chest, just starting to prickle with milk, as they hurtled their way toward the bright automatic doors.

  I stop by the trailer to grab some more tapes when an unfamiliar car—a gold Mercury Zephyr, early eighties, probably, spotted with Bondo, pulls up. My mother gets out, along with another woman—Anchee, the woman from Luk’s Market. She has a bruise around her left eye. Both of them look at me slightly perturbed.

  “We look all over for you!” says my mother. “We drive around, look at bird hospital, look at restaurant, look at here, you not anywhere!”

  “Three time we come round here!” Anchee says. I can’t help but smile, thinking of the Cahuilla myth.

  “I’m sorry—I was at Darryl’s house.”

  “We not know where that is!” Anchee says. Her hand flutters up to her bruise.

  I look in the car. It is stuffed to the gills with clothes and pots and pans and houseplants and two birdcages—Yukam’s, and one with what looks like a small robin inside.

  “Don’t you touch those birds!” my mother says.

  “No you touch the birds,” Anchee echoes. “Your mother tell me what you do. Shame in you!”

  Shame in me, yes, I think to myself. So much shame. Too much shame. So much I can’t even bear to think about it.

  “Omma, it looks like you’re moving in.”

  She and Anchee nod. “Good for work on egg,” says my mother. “Palm Springs nearby, many craft fair, many people want to buy fancy egg.”

  I open the car door and start to unload some of her stuff, stunned.

  “What about the apartment in San Diego?”

  “I move out,” she says. “I don’t wanna stay in broken egg place.”

  “What did you do with all the furniture?”

  “I call someone, they take it away,” she shrugs. “They give me a few dollar for it.”

  “What about your car?” I ask my mother.

  “I sell it,” she says.

  “For how much?”

  “Your mother get seven hundred dollar,” Anchee says proudly.

  “Omma,” I groan. “You could have gotten three times that much!”

  My mother shrugs.

  “Don’t you think you should have warned me about all this first? What if there wasn’t any space in the trailer?”

  “You say you at Darryl house…” She has a hard time with the syllables of his name—it sounds like a gurgle in her mouth.

  “I’m not sleeping there…” I don’t know what else to say. I turn to Anchee. “It was nice of you to drive her out.”

  “Anchee stay, too,” my mother says.

  “Here?”

  “Me and you sleep in bed,” she says. “Anchee sleep in couch. Or me and Anchee sleep in bed, you sleep in couch. Or just me sleep in bed, Anchee sleep in couch, you sleep in Darryl house.”

  “Omma!” I’m shocked she would even suggest this. Every time she’s noticed me even look at a man before, she’s jumped down my throat.

  “He don’t care if you a black girl.” I can’t tell if this is a statement or a question.

  “No, of course not,” I tell her, although I’ve wondered if that’s what initially attracted him to me—a whole different kind of skin to touch. I’d like to think it was more than that, that some mysterious force brought us together, but I don’t really know.

  “People always surprise you come out of me. When you little girl, sometimes I pretend I a baby-sitter for you so people don’t say nasty thing.”

  “Omma, I’m sure people didn’t care as much as you thought they did. I don’t know if people ever really noticed us at all.”

  She looks at me like I have no idea what I’m talking about, then starts to pile the contents of the car on the trailer lift.

  Over the next week or so, I sleep on the couch and let my mother and Anchee take the bed. They moved all of my clothes into kitchen cabinets so that I won’t have any reason to go near the birdcages in the bedroom. I go over to Darryl’s house to get away, but I feel a different kind of pressure there.

  “Maybe you should take Ecstasy again,” he says, only half kidding, as we sit on the edge of his bed, rumpled and breathing hard after another marathon kiss. “Maybe it would help you get over this hump.”

  “No pun intended, right?” I lean into him. He laughs and kisses my forehead.

  “I can give you a better kind of ecstasy myself, Ava. I like to think I can, at least.”

  I bite my lip.

  “My version is a lot less dangerous than X, too,” he says. “It’s all natural, no side effects. There is, however, a chance that you’ll find it addictive. A good chance, I hope.”

  I’m sure he knows this feels way more dangerous to me than any pill ever could. My mother’s whole history, my whole history, weigh on me like a bag of dead birds. She’s essentially given me her blessing to be here, but it’s a heavy blessing, almost a burden. I don’t know how I’ll be able to shake it all off. I want to, more and more all the time. I want to be able to shake it all off.

  Darryl scooches off the bed and kneels in front of me. I hold my breath.

  “I want to help you feel good, Ava. It’s driving me crazy.”

  “I know…” Go away, Omma. I don’t need you here.

  He touches the top button of my shirt. “Is this okay? Please tell me this is okay.”

  My mother’s outline hovers inside my head. This isn’t going to hurt you, I tell her. I don’t have to hurt like you. Her molecules shimmer like dust. When I breathe out, some of the particles scatter. This is a good thing, Omma. Please go away. Her outline begins to fade. I sta
rt to feel guilty for chasing her off, but before she can gather herself together, reassert herself again in my mind, I turn to the warm real bulk of Darryl’s body.

  “I should warn you,” I tell him, my heart at a furious boil. “I have weird nipples.”

  He looks amused. “Do they shoot root beer? Do they talk?”

  “They’re inverted. They point in.” I flush. I’ve never told anyone about my nipples before. The only conversation I’ve ever had about them was when I was about eleven and my mother came into the bathroom when I was in the tub. She looked at my chest and told me no man would ever want a strange girl like me. She seemed happy about this, relieved, like I had found a way to save myself.

  “They’re yours,” he smiles, and slips the button through its hole.

  My breath catches. “I’m really scared, Darryl.”

  “And you think I’m not? Look at this…” His fingers tremble as he undoes another button.

  “Just the shirt, okay?” I lie back on the bed, more stiffly than I would have liked. I think of the woman I found on the beach, her nipple lifeless between my fingers, her body rigid. I think of my mother in Kunsan, the first time she was with a man. Her body must have been stiff then, too, contracted against his foreign body, wooden with fear. I’ve never let myself visualize that exact moment; I skimmed over it when I wrote that part of her story. She’s never given me any specific details about that night; I don’t know if I could handle them.