Why Do Birds

by Rob Hoerburger

  She flew home, elated, with a tape of those early tracks. Took them over to the parents’ house. They had dinner first. “You’re not eating,” the mother said. “I’m too excited,” she said, pushing the food around her plate. Then she played the tape. “So what do you think?” she asked. They pushed the songs around on their plates. “Well, that’s different,” one or the other of them said, head down. “Now let’s clear the table.” While she went to collect the tape, the mother said: “You should see your brother. He’s looking really refreshed, says he’ll be ready to go back into the studio soon. He’s put on some weight. . . . ”

  By the sixth month, they were still only about halfway done. There were delays. P. was busy with other artists. She worried about her parents’ reaction. While she was recording one of the more challenging songs, which required a lot of vocal calisthenics, she was soaked in sweat and had to excuse herself; this time the trip to the bathroom wasn’t pre-planned. And there was that fainting spell she’d had at P. and I.’s house. When the paramedics came, she was already awake. P. begged them not to tell anyone who she was or what had happened. Disco was still around but seemed to be peaking, maybe starting to fade. Something called new wave was all the rage. Dizzying. Spinning. A turbocharged turntable platter.

  The hot songwriter came through with a few new songs. Meanwhile, the songs of his that she turned down when the sessions for her album started months ago were completed and sent to the grown-up Motown wunderkind. His version of one of them was starting to climb the charts. She heard it on the radio and loved it. “You couldn’t have done that for me?” she said to the songwriter.

  They finished almost nine months to the day after they started. P. recommended a photographer from Vogue to shoot the album cover. When she saw the glam proofs, she felt as if she were looking at someone else. “Look at me, I.,” she said. “I’m pretty. I’m really pretty.” She’d never been so excited about an impending release. The album already had a catalog number. The record company was chatting it up; even though not many of the staffers had heard any of it. They were banking on her name and P.’s name to guarantee a smash. All that was left now was the delivery.

  She and P. gathered the label bosses. And she requested that the brother be in the delivery room, too. Oh, they were going to love this.

  Except, they didn’t. After every track the label chiefs just sat there, bone silent. Or said something like, “Why would you do a song like that?” H., handsome H., did like a couple of the tracks. But over all this was not the reaction she was expecting. What was wrong with it? she said to P. later. They wouldn’t tell her outright, only that it didn’t give them the same good feeling they had about the records she made with the brother. P. told her the more overtly sexual songs must have made them think he was despoiling their daughter.

  And the brother? He couldn’t find enough bad things to say about it. The songs are crap, he said. Your voice is too high, he said. Nobody at the label likes it, he said. It’s utterly unworthy of us, he said. At one point he said she was “stealing their sound.” How could she be stealing something that she helped create?

  She wanted to kill him. Or at least tell him off. What do you know? she wanted to say. You haven’t exactly been producing many hits for us lately. You could never make a record this cool. Maybe you don’t know everything. If the record is a hit, it will only help us. If it bombs, it will only prove you were right. It’s a win-win situation for you, she wanted to say.

  She actually said none of this. Maybe she was stealing their sound. Maybe in a way she was stealing his life. He was supposed to be the star. At least when they were a “duo,” when he was adding his voice, his arrangements, his production, when they were out on the road together, he still had a version of that life. On this album, he had nothing.

  She and P. did try to save it. They worked up some different mixes. They changed the sequence of songs, burying that disco tune in the middle of Side 2. P.’s close friend Q., a legendary producer in his own right, who had overseen the Motown wunderkind’s big album, invited everyone to his home for a second listen. But to no avail. Her baby was stillborn.

  The spin on the dead album was that the brother was healthy now and she wanted to go back to their career. The solo project was just “something to keep me busy,” she was quoted as saying. The more she kept telling friends and reporters this story, the more she started to believe it herself. Half a million and almost a year of her life spent on “something to keep me busy.”

  Now, though, more than two years after the official burial, she had a mad craving to hear the album again. She didn’t have a copy of the tape with her in New York. She knew P. would have it at the studio, though. He was in there today. She had planned to go shop- ping for I. and P.’s baby — even though it wasn’t due for months yet, she wanted to have all the presents bought and scheduled to be sent before she went back to Los Angeles — but instead of heading up Madison Avenue, when she got outside the hotel, she found herself wandering west. The guy with the shopping cart was at his usual post on Sixth Avenue; he was shirtless again but wearing a chef ’s hat marked with grease stains, and a cardboard sign was planted atop the pile of junk, which included a discarded Easy-Bake Oven in his cart: “A Taste of Nam Honey,” it said, written in lipstick, with a “menu” underneath that offered Agent Orange Chicken, Napalm Spring Rolls, My Lai Mai-Tais and Sub-Cuticle Bamboo Shoots. “Stick to stick,” he was saying. Stick, she thought? Drumstick?

  The back “plate” 45 on the cart was Jefferson Airplane’s “White Rabbit.” The front “plate” 45 was the T-Bones’ “No Matter What Shape (Your Stomach’s In).” Drumstick, she thought, something you play with, not something you eat. Music, not food. Music, not food. She decided to skip the donation.

  As she waited for the light, the vet suddenly rolled the cart in front of her. And just as suddenly his cheek was next to hers; she could feel the stubble brushing against her face and smell the stench of him as if it were coming from within her. “Play to your ugly,” he said, then spit on her.

  “What?” she said, wiping her face with her sleeve and trying to move away but blocked by the cart. “Play till I’m ugly?”

  “YOUR ugly,” he croaked. “YOUR ugly. OWN your ugly.”

  By now a few people had started to look over at them. The vet let out a hoarse cackle, jerked away and started back up Sixth Avenue, the chef’s hat slipping down the side of his head and the Easy- Bake Oven rattling on top of the cart. The light had changed to red again, and she was stuck on the corner. A young man in a jogging suit asked if she was all right. She took a Kleenex from her jacket pocket and wiped the rest of the cart guy’s saliva off her face. “I’m fine,” she said, “thank you. Crazies everywhere in New York.” And then when the light turned green, she hurried across Sixth Avenue.

  I am not ugly, I am not ugly, I am pretty, she whispered to herself as she crossed Sixth Avenue. Now she not only needed to hear the solo album, she needed to see the cover again. Vogue photographers don’t take pictures of ugly girls, she thought.

  P.’s studio was on Seventh Avenue, and as she got near it, she started to remember how nice everyone had been in those first months of the solo sessions, the receptionist who always brought her tea, the guys in the band who treated her like, well, like one of the guys. “What do you think of that take?” she would ask the band, who always stuck around to hear her lay down her vocals, and they would say, “What’s important is what you think.” I. would cheer her on from the control room. And there was that silly but wonderful phallus-shaped cake. Maybe she should have taken a bite after all.

  She was a block away when she abruptly turned and circled back around a side street. She wasn’t quite ready to go in yet. Even two years later, the wound was still too fresh.

  She’d lost track of the block she was on when she passed a church with a line snaking around the corner. The line comprised mostly sad-looking men in unseasonal clothes, oversize sweat pants, tweed jackets, tattered wor
k boots. Smudgy faces and, as she got closer, body odor like spoiled fruit, like the cart man’s, so fresh in her nose. One old guy was shadowboxing in the gutter. It looked like a Depression bread line, the kind she’d seen in history books and old black-and-white movies. Tramps on freight trains. But this was 1982. Who was hungry in America in 1982?

  Then she saw someone emerge from a side door with a huge block of cheese in a cardboard box. It wasn’t the strange geometry of the cheese that surprised her but rather the woman holding it. She was wearing high heels and had long polished nails and hair climbing high in a beauty-parlor do. A blue, slightly wrinkled silk dress that might have come from Saks. She blinked to look; yes, it had to be a food line. Then around the corner, at the back, she saw a man in a seersucker suit reading The Times.

  Maybe it was a movie shoot, she thought, except she didn’t see any cameras. As an oniony aroma hit her nose, she instinctively looked for the nearest tree or planter, the way she did when she passed a roach coach or a hot-dog cart; she knew that the leaves absorbed the smell.

  People in line for food. In 1982. She thought of what she’d left on her breakfast tray in the hotel, food that had probably ended up in some trash bin. If she’d known, she might have brought it with her.

  She turned back toward the studio. This time she got as far as the door. Would the receptionist be the same one and recognize her? she wondered. Would the tape be there? She hadn’t listened to it in a couple of years. How would it sound? How would it feel?

  In the end, she couldn’t go in. It would be like entering a nursery that was fully appointed — crib, layettes, stuffed animals — but had never been occupied.

  She thought about heading back toward her subway platform, but it was too soon for the finale. So she went to the record store.

  When she got to the back room, there was that girl again, the one with the broad shoulders and the backpack. She was in front of the same section. Only this time the girl was with a man about her age. And they were talking about a song she didn’t know.

  20. Queens, N.Y., Summer 1982

  The service for Rose was held on an almost unbearably bright, hot morning at a Jewish funeral home in Belle Harbor. Sib had heard it was going to be open casket, and she wondered where they’d find one big enough to hold all of Rose’s body. But when she got there, the coffin was in front of the room and looked to be normal size, and Rose was comfortably nestled into the pillowed, upholstered box, looking almost svelte, her bouffant now deflated, like the rest of her, and her hair hanging down in prim obsidian strands around her pancaked face and just reaching her pink chiffon dress. Chiffon. Sib smiled. Rose looked beautiful. Sib thought about how she herself was still in a coma when Kieran and her mother were waked and buried.

  At some Catholic wakes things like sports pennants or military medals or family pictures were allowed inside the coffins with the deceased, and especially with women, rosary beads were often threaded through the fingers. Jewish burial rituals didn’t allow this. But in the front row of seats, on a chair by itself, was Rose’s beloved whip, as if it were one of the deceased’s immediate family receiving mourners, its handle shiny, its thong in the middle of the circle brushing up against a black-and-white photo of Tony Martin, Rose’s favorite singer. The funeral home was filled with all manner of customers from the store: jazz cats and elementary-school teachers, former hippies now in suits and oxford shirts and neutral-colored pantsuits, aging still-hippies with unwashed frizz and paunches sticking out of their tie-dyes, other regulars of the store like Sib and Timmy Sweeney and Larry the D.J. and her father. Over the years Rose had gone out of her way to find some treasure for all of them, musical or nonmusical. Her husband — yes, there was a husband, a pomaded and Old Spiced and spit-shined man named Horace, who owned a nightclub — greeted and thanked them for coming. Sib was moved to see all the men wearing yarmulkes out of respect for Rose and her faith. The record store had actually closed for good in 1974, just after the first energy crisis, when Rose said she couldn’t bring herself to charge “a whole dollar for a 45.” But all these years later, the mourners who remembered her kindnesses came out in droves. “My beautiful Rose,” Horace said. “The perennial bloom.”

  There was a shiva and a spread back at Horace and Rose’s apartment, but Sib, Timmy and Larry decided that a better tribute would be for them to go to the closest thing to Rose’s store now. So they got on the subway and headed into Manhattan to Downstairs, without bothering to go home and change. Sib as always had her running shoes in her backpack anyway. They arrived around lunchtime, and the far room, with all the good stuff, was crowded. Sib couldn’t help herself. She was soon in front of the same section again.

  “Why do you do this?” Timmy said. “Do you really need to keep reliving it?”

  As Sib thumbed through and considered those 45s, especially that first big hit, the memory assaulted her senses once more. She could smell the deli on the kitchen table, and the Schaefer on Aunt Maddy’s breath, and the patchouli in Rose’s store, and the exhaust on Liberty Avenue in those last minutes before the crash, and then the antiseptic of the hospital room, and she could feel, everywhere, the strangeness again. The guilt. How she woke up the first time, in a different bed from her own and attached to monitors and IVs, and looked at her dad, standing over her, and how the thing she was aware of most was Kieran’s absence. Then when she woke up the second time, it was not the hospital room that surprised her but another absence. She looked at her dad, again near her bedside, and just mouthed the words. “Where’s Mom?” The sudden squint in his eyes told her everything. Then she woke up a third time, for good now, but again with a sense that something else was missing. Her father was sitting by her bedside this time, looking at the sports pages of The Daily News. “Dad,” she said. And she realized that she couldn’t hear.

  So it wasn’t just an emptier house she went home to after weeks in the hospital, a house without Kieran, without her mother. Now it was a house without sound. No voices. No el. No footfalls on the stairs. No TV. No creaking of her bed when she rolled over. No water splashing into the sinks or tub. No music. She kept thinking it would come back any second, that something just got caught in her ears and would shake itself loose. She’d turn the radio on or play a record, certain that sound would return if only she tried to hear hard enough, turned the volume dial far enough, if she willed it back. Her father took her to ear-nose-and-throat docs, to audiologists, to psychologists, even to an acupuncturist. She was asked the same questions over and over: Do you have any ringing? No. Do you hear crickets? No. Can you hear this? No. The pressure in her ears was tested again and again. Normal every time. Every specialist told them the same thing: There was nothing physically or anatomically wrong with Sib’s ears. She had a condition known as hysterical deafness. It’s usually caused, Sib learned, by some kind of psychological trauma. The hearing could come back at any time, or the loss could last indefinitely.

  She didn’t want to go to a school for the deaf or learn sign language (though she and Timmy Sweeney did invent a kind of sign shorthand, mainly to sum up their moods, up, down, sideways, the number of fingers designating the degree). She became a quick study at lip reading, paying close attention to actors on TV and in real life positioning herself in front of faces, deliberately speaking slowly so that whomever she was talking to would go at her speed. Her dad got small blackboards and sheaves of notepaper to write messages to her, but she never wrote back. She always spoke. She went down to the basement and put on a record every day. Watched it spin. Pressed one ear and then the other to a speaker so that she could at least feel the vibrations. Sometimes Timmy would come over with some latest hit or other and sing along with it, and she sat near him and felt his breath and watched his lips. She liked, so far as she could tell from the words and rhythm of Timmy’s lips, Carole King, Carly Simon, the Spinners, Roberta Flack, the O’Jays.

  She insisted she could stay in regular school, but that’s where her father and school officials d
rew the line. In the end she had a tutor. The hearing loss did have one upside, in that it helped both Sib and her father take their minds off their other losses. For Sib, sometimes she felt that if her hearing came back, maybe they would, too. Not really, but dealing with deafness generally helped keep her mind off missing half her family. She kept Kieran’s record collection in immaculate condition.

  Every Saturday Roy would still take her to Rose’s shop. Rose would place her hands over Sib’s head, tap them 18 times (18 was a special spiritual number in Hebrew, Rose started to scribble in a note; Sib grabbed the pen out of Rose’s hand and made her say the words instead), and Sib would just bow, not expecting that anything would really happen but figuring that if anyone had magical powers, it would be Rose. Sib would scan the Billboard or Cash Box or WABC charts, look up and down the 45 wall. But she always averted her eyes when she saw a song by them. One hit after another. Four, five, six, eight, 10 big hits in a row. This was almost more torture than not being able to hear or losing Kieran and her mom. She blamed them for everything, almost as a way of not blaming herself.

  So it went for more than three years. Sib turned 11, then 12, and then 13, and still every day she was sure that it was going to be the one when her hearing returned. Neighbors came over with covered dishes, especially kindly Mrs. O’Keeffe, who lived next door and from whose kitchen there were always warm, sweet and yeasty smells, who never complained when Sib was pounding the basketball on the driveway early in the morning or after dark. Sib loved her chocolate-chip bars and homemade iced tea. The aunts from both sides were always popping by. (Constance: “Make sure to keep your ears clean, dear. That will help the sound get through.” Sib didn’t even have to read her lips to know what she was saying.) No team would let her play sports, no hearing team anyway, so she would play catch with her dad or shoot foul shots for hours in the driveway, or they’d go play golf on a pitch-and-putt course and she would scream “Fore” at the top of her lungs. In the reflection from their clubs she could see that her face was busting red. But no matter how loud she screamed, she still couldn’t hear a sound.