Why Do Birds

by Rob Hoerburger

  And yet, she entered Downstairs Records that day with some small filament of hope. As desultory as pop music was these days, there was still the occasional gem like “Forget Me Nots.” Sib also really loved Squeeze’s “Black Coffee in Bed,” which she knew would be far too literate to get Top 40 play, and there was a new Melissa Manchester song, “You Should Hear How She Talks About You,” that was hitting her ears the right way. Though even that was just a good girl-group pastiche by a B-plus singer (she laughed when she heard that Toto played on it; she liked them much better as a studio backup band). Just where had all the great female singers gone? No wonder Top 40 was in the doldrums. Female singers usually got the best songs, and now there weren’t that many good ones around to sing them anymore, so they weren’t being written. Sib and Larry, the D.J. at Whelan’s who also wanted to be a record producer, had decided that whoever found the next great female voice could basically print his or her own money.

  Sib had been wandering around the store and as usual found herself in front of the same section, thumbing again through the 30 or so singles there. Why was she still so drawn to that group’s section every time? That was really the nostalgist in her that she couldn’t bear the most. She looked at the arrangement of the singles: chronological order again, with the droopy Beatles’ cover in front and then, in spot No. 2, the song that started everything. It was the song that she had disagreed with Kieran about, the song that was No. 1 that day, the last song they heard together.

  Sib yanked the 45 out of its place, as if calling it into account. She rubbed her index finger around the center hole over and over until she almost cut herself and then picked it up with two hands and squeezed and pressed her palms so hard against the sides that the record almost shattered. Then she forwarded to that other song, the one that was No. 1 and playing on the radio on the day her hearing came back. The joy of sound, so suddenly returned to her after more than three years, was undercut by the bitterness of that voice, still so sweet and sickly to her ears. The group had other hits in between, and to Sib those two songs were like bookends of misery from those years. She gathered up all of those other hits and poked her fingers through them and shook them and squeezed them tight into the bottoms of their heavy green wrappers, until one of the store clerks started giving her looks. But one thing she never did was play them on the public turntable. Not one. In fact, she’d never heard all those in-between big hits. She hadn’t been able to when they were first popular, and later when she got her hearing back she simply changed the radio station if one of them came on. Good thing most of her friends were boys, who wouldn’t be caught dead with one of those records anyway. And then the group disappeared after a few years, and their songs weren’t played so much. But she still couldn’t bring herself to listen to them.

  Sib was getting ready to pull herself away from the section and go to the register to pay for “Forget Me Nots” when she had a vague notion that someone was walking in circles around the carrel, a slight figure who seemed to be a woman. But with a baseball cap covering the hair and the Ray-Bans and no discernible cleavage, Sib couldn’t tell at first, until the person passed and had her back to Sib, and she could see the wide hips that seemed to have been assembled onto the wrong chassis, a Buick trunk on a Datsun. Even so, Sib had her city-girl elbows ready to jab, just in case the woman tried something. You couldn’t trust anyone these days.

  The last time the woman passed, something got caught on Sib’s backpack. It was the woman’s bracelet, which seemed to have little gold records on it. As the woman tried to untangle herself, she kept her head down and seemed to mumble something that sounded like, “Are you going to buy that record?”

  “Buy it?” Sib said as she turned back toward the carrel to pull herself free from the bracelet. “I’d rather burn it.” As she turned back toward the woman, she said, “Here, you can have it,” but by then the woman was scurrying out of the store. “Weird,” Sib thought. “Even the record store isn’t safe.” But then, Sib had known that for years.

  “Where’d you go, Chiff?”

  “What, oh, just thinking about some strange woman I saw in the record store. And generally practicing this whole grown-up thing called stress.” Sib looked at the clock behind the bar. It was game time. “Gotta go, Sweeney. Don’t take any wooden Duran Durans.”

  “Please,” Timmy said. “I should be so lucky.”

  7. Brooklyn, N.Y., Early 1950s

  Genie loved the basement. The burner, the toolboxes, the paint cans, the overalls on a hook. Some man, she thought, must have installed that hulk of a burner, with its pipes and cranks and sliding toggles and tightened-for-life nuts and bolts, its wheezing roar. Some man must have swung the hammer in that toolbox, screwed the screws, turned the wrenches, worn the overalls, slapped that paint on walls somewhere. On top of one paint can there was a pair of tattered boxing gloves, with loose, threadbare laces; somebody, some man, must have worn them while sparring, boxing with another man, his hands and face and body absorbing and inflicting blows and bloodying some other man’s face.

  But Genie never knew who. Maybe her father, whom she’d never seen. “He’s with the angels,” was all her mother or sisters would say whenever she’d ask. Some relative or other occasionally chimed in: “Oh, a safe dropped out of a window and landed right next to him, and he went crazy and was never seen again. They put him away somewhere.” Somebody else said he had gambled all the family money away or ran whiskey during Prohibition and was exiled to some flophouse. Genie got to the point where she didn’t know what to believe, and just stopped asking. There were never any photographs of him.

  There was also a brother, much older, who had gone into World War II when Genie was in grammar school. When he came back, Genie went to embrace him, and he pushed her away, saying, “I don’t know who you are.” For a few weeks he just sat in a corner strumming a guitar. He was supposed to give her sister Bern away at her wedding, but never showed up. “Oh, he was a guard at the Nuremberg trials and went crazy hearing all that horrible stuff,” her sister Maddy’s husband, a cigar-smoking, braces-wearing soda salesman named Charlie, said. After that, he, too, disappeared from the family photo albums, had his name erased from the family Bible.

  It was a Sunday afternoon, and Genie, still in her church clothes, was taking deep inhales of all this phantom maleness in the basement, a few shards of sun poking through the window wells, the air dank and boozy, like some gin mill out on the avenue during St. Patrick’s Day season, which in her neighborhood started around Valentine’s Day and practically lasted till Easter, itself a male thing. She walked over to one of the walls, stepped out of her dress and good shoes and, in her bra, girdle and stockings, pulled the overalls off the hook and put them on. She was top-heavy, the most buxom of the sisters, with a rounder, less stately frame than the straight-spined Maddy or Con or especially the spindly, wiry Bern, and in the overalls, she felt less self-conscious about her breasts, which almost seemed to get lost in the roomy flaps, the way she would when she hid behind the winter drapes as a child. She kept her crucifix, given to her by Maddy for her confirmation, on. Jesus, after all, was a man. She dug her hands into the bottomless pockets. Pockets everywhere! You could fit a couple of hammers in them, maybe even an entire drill.

  Genie then grabbed some dumbbells off a shelf and a spring contraption called a chest pull, in a box with a drawing of a shirtless bodybuilder who looked like Jack LaLanne. She did a few biceps curls with the dumbbells, then pulled the spring contraption across her chest five or six times. Her breasts snapped to attention with each stretch, and her crucifix followed in a bouncy, syncopated rhythm. Together the sound of the expanding springs and the clinking chain almost made some kind of musical tone, a melody of male-femaleness. Genie didn’t have any goal in mind, any number of reps, any new body she was trying to shape. She was just doing what felt good. What felt easy.

  After the third or fourth pull, Genie became aware of a small pair of eyes peering at her through the slat
s on the stairs.

  “Who’s there?” she said on an exhale, with the springs at full extension.

  “It’s just me, Aunt Genie,” came the peepish voice from the stairs. It was Colleen, Bern’s oldest girl, 6 or 7 now, in her Sunday dress, saddle shoes and ringlets, already a skinny glam bean like her mother.

  “Colleen, come over here,” Genie said, without breaking her motion. The girl went all the way down the stairs and skipped over across the concrete floor, but as she got closer and beheld her aunt in overalls and crucifix, pulling apart the contraption, her skip became tentative, slightly stumbling. Genie could smell the fear, the way she could when she used to wield her stickball bat during the neighborhood games or barreled around a corner on her roller skates years ago. “Don’t mess with Genie,” everyone said. The businessmen who parked near Ebbets Field during Dodgers games were always happy to hire young Genie to keep vandals away from their cars.

  As Colleen got closer, Genie knelt down on the floor next to her. “What can I do for you?” she said, locking her eyes with Colleen’s while continuing to pull the spring thing across her chest.

  “Grandma wants you to come upstairs and sing,” the girl said. Then, with a slight stutter, “Aunt Genie, are you . . . are you a boy?” Genie smiled and put down the chest pull. She picked up the boxing gloves, near her on the floor, one in each hand, and gathered the girl’s face between them. She pressed against the girl’s temples just hard enough to elicit a shudder. “No, honey, I’m a girl just like you,” she said. “Only not as pretty.” Then she fluffed up Colleen’s ringlets with the gloves and said, “Now you scoot back upstairs and tell them I’ll be right there.” Colleen skipped to the staircase and up to the first floor, while

  Genie changed out of the overalls and back into her dress. She had slipped away into the basement while the others were clearing the dishes from dinner. But now they must have been ready to move on to the last part of the Sunday-afternoon tradition, singing in the lacy front parlor. The sisters’ mother, Lillian, played the piano, and though her fingers, and her memory, were a little creaky, she could still knock out 10 or so songs from memory, early Tin Pan Alley ditties like “Let Me Call You Sweetheart” and “Sidewalks of New York.” Genie liked singing with her sisters almost as much as she liked being in the basement.

  She rinsed her face at a large basin where they usually wrung out clothes — unlike her sisters, she never wore makeup, so there was no need to reapply — and headed upstairs. On the way she saw her old stickball bat in a corner. Another thing that always felt easy to her.

  Upstairs, Maddy, Con, Bern, Colleen and Mrs. Rooney had already gathered in the front room. Genie took her place with them as Mrs. Rooney spread her fingers into “Sidewalks of New York,” and the sisters burst into, “East Side, West Side, all around the town.” Then another Irish drinking song, “Harrigan.” They all sang in unison, with verve and solidarity. Then “Let Me Call You Sweetheart,” during which the girls joined hands and swayed together, sisters in tune musically and epistemologically.

  Genie wouldn’t have minded if their mother, who sat stone-faced at the piano and bumped into a few wrong notes here and there but still kept up with the girls, had learned something a little more current or jazzy, like “Come On-A My House” or a tune from the score of Guys and Dolls. But she knew that wasn’t likely to happen. Genie owned these records, but whenever she played them, or songs by Billie Holiday or Nat King Cole, her mother called them “jump numbers.” Yet she still looked forward to singing with her sisters every week because they all doted on her, baby of the family that she was, the only one to have graduated from high school, and now attending Brooklyn College, paid for by Maddy and Con. (Bern, after running away from home at 16 and becoming a Broadway gypsy — all the Rooney girls were great dancers — had met and married Uncle Billy and moved into the house next to their mother’s.) Genie was something of the family’s last chance for redemption now; the same kind of hopes were being invested in her that most families in the neighborhood invested in their sons. Maybe, they thought not so secretly, she’d become a doctor or a lawyer.

  And she also had the best voice, a silvery alto that, like everything else she did well, seemed effortlessly tuneful.

  After four or five songs, Mrs. Rooney’s fingers started plunking out a few upper-level chords: Here was the most current song she knew, and the sisters all sat up in their chairs. It was Cole Porter’s “I Get a Kick Out of You,” almost 20 years old now but still being recorded by popular singers of the day like Frank Sinatra and Ella Fitzgerald. Maddy said, just out of habit, “Genie, you take the lead.” Genie touched the crucifix at her throat, her chest and lungs fully expanded now after a brief session with the chest pull, and as her mother continued to play arpeggios, sang of a sad story. But her voice was anything but sad. It was calm and assured, a natural buoy bobbing on a calm sea, with a slight surge every time she sang the hard ending k in “kick.” Maddy and Con each took a line of the bridge, but Genie was back soloing for the final verse. The line had no desperation or need, the way it did when most other singers sang it. It was an affirmation, almost as if she were singing the song to herself. It was all lilt.

  “Oh, Genie, that was wonderful,” Maddy said, with her usual slightly ditzy, slightly regal effusiveness. Bern and Colleen did an exaggerated box step across the room. Her mother just closed the piano lid. No more singing today, she barked, nothing could be better than that. Only Constance, the usual killjoy, was qualified. “Very nice, Genie, but shouldn’t you get to studying? You have school tomorrow.”

  Genie did have a sociology class at Brooklyn College the next day, and her books sat on the stairs waiting for her. She smiled and nodded. “Yes, Con, you’re right.” What she didn’t say was that she was planning to quit college at the end of the semester. She’d never had trouble in high school. Making the honor roll was a given. But college was hard. All those papers. All those god-awful footnotes. All those other smart kids. And now most of her friends — who were men — were being shipped off to the Korean War, and school started to look like a bigger version of her house full of women.

  Genie thought she might enlist herself. But that would probably be too hard, too, and she’d just be in the ranks of more women.

  Before they broke, though, Maddy’s husband, Charlie, appeared, a few drafts on his breath, and said he wanted to take a picture. The girls gathered in front of the fireplace, glamorous Bern with her hair in a shiny pile and Colleen on her lap looking right at the lens. Maddy and Con looked vaguely at Mrs. Rooney with some kind of admiration, while Mrs. Rooney herself, the stately center of the frame, turned in profile away from them all. Genie was in the bottom corner of the shot, looking into it, seemingly perched on a starting block, ready to break out across it.

  A man might have been taking the picture, but as was so often the case with the Rooneys, men were out of it.

  8. New York City, Summer 1982

  “Did I tell you about the girl I saw carrying a backpack the other day? It looked really odd.”

  “What was so odd about it?” asked the doctor, seated in the bigger of two leather chairs in his East Side office, across from the wall of books in the dark-paneled room. Most of them, she thought, were the imposing, embossed, stiff psychology texts that never seemed to have been opened, but one, slightly off center in the middle shelf of the middle section, was his own, which had been a best seller and the first widely read book about her “problem.” Of course she had the best therapist in the business. Once, that is, she admitted there was “a problem.” He was older, kind of avuncular, looked like family and money.

  The last therapy session had been particularly dismal, devoted as it was to her “homework assignment” — she was to think of meals she would serve when she returned to L.A. Ever the mathematical patient, she had broken them down into three groups: a birthday party for her godchildren, F.’s twins, with croque-monsieurs and frites and individual cakes for 32, the face of each attend
ee lovingly spackled in double-chocolate frosting (“Lindsay, I just ate my nose”) and Tiffany goblets overflowing with M&Ms; a Thanksgiving dinner with galantine of turkey and oyster dressing and yams stuffed with orange marmalade (to cut down on the butter) and fresh cranberries from Cape Cod (she got the recipes from a New England magazine in the library) and, because she knew she’d be eating with her family, the mother’s inevitable greasy green beans and bacon; and finally a Champagne brunch for her friends in the business, singers and costumers and caterers, the ones the mother referred to as “the Uptown crowd.” The misery of the experience was relieved only for a moment, when she thought of how her hairdresser had once shown up for a luncheon in crepe de Chine and pumps and she said conspiratorially to F., What would the mother think if she saw this?

  The assignment was discussed down to the place settings and the palate cleansers, and then the weekly weigh-in was held. The make-believe menus, intended as an imaging device, didn’t quite have the desired effect, as she was down a pound.