All the Dancing Birds (16 page)

It’s in these moments of sunny thought that I’m strengthened and able to continue hiding the odd nature of my illness. Somehow I’m always able to rise above the clattering fray, to gather my piles of clothes and place them in the hamper, or to scurry through the house with a dust cloth. To quickly sort through the mail. Snip away dried leaves from my potted violets lolling on the kitchen window sill. Take a leisurely soak in the tub, put on makeup. Find my perfume.

But then I always crash, each time slamming harder than before, tearing myself open with the broken shards of this awful disease.

I am lucid. Then I’m not. Still, I manage to hide it all from everyone, because it seems the only reasoned course‌—‌just in case I become better.

Just in case.

Allison sends a cleaning lady twice a week, every Monday and Friday. I’m always surprised when the doorbell rings and a woman I don’t know stands on my porch with a bucket of cleaning supplies and a mop, begging to be let in.

These women are lucky I’m a lady with a Southern upbringing. I’m convinced they leave with their pockets filled with my things, although I never catch anyone in the act in spite of my chattering vigilance over every sweep of the hand. I stand over them as they scrub away toilet rings and tidy the kitchen. I follow them around as they pick up my clothes and wash my dishes, as they guide a broom across the floor and vacuum the carpet. As they dust, polish, fold the finished laundry, and sweep the floor. I watch over every movement as they spread the scent of cleanliness across the rooms of my home.

They diligently create order from stem to stern, but each new and different woman fails to do the simple task of picking up my fallen-down mind. It’s no wonder‌—‌and certainly not my fault‌—‌that when they’re done and packing to go, I yell at them to
never
come back again.

On Saturdays, men come into my yard with noisy mowers and weed-eaters and blowers to whisk away the evidence of my inattentiveness to the garden. When they come, I move to the centermost spot in the house and stand as still as a statue until they finish and reload their equipment into their truck. I don’t like their noise and I don’t like what they do to my plants.

After the men with their lawnmowers and leaf blowers are gone, I tiptoe outside and lay soft apologies like tiny prayers over my poor flowers and bushes for the horrid assaults they must have endured at the hands of those noisy, grass-stained men.

The Monday and Friday women are difficult enough, but I especially don’t like the Saturday men.

On Sunday mornings, my children come to see the handiwork of the labor that has occurred over the week. They cluck and coo over sparkling floors and manicured lawns as if they had made the shine and orderliness with their own hands. Bryan whisks up my neatly stacked mail and places it in a plastic bag; he’ll take it with him when he leaves.

He used to spread papers across the table for me for me to sign. One day I signed something so I wouldn’t have to sign things any longer. Bryan told me he was putting my money in trust. We argued over that‌—‌a great heaving, sighing argument as heated and tear-filled as when he took away my car‌—‌but in the end, I gave Bryan control over all paper things and all car things. Now he just takes my mail without comment and I say nothing in return.

I’ve no idea where my car went (along with my keys from the lettuce drawer that started all this).

I guess today is Sunday because my children arrive, shaking a rainy Sacramento sky from their shoes and forming smiles upon their faces. They kiss my cheek and say
Good morning, Mom,
not particularly with words, but rather with their kissing mouths and patting hands.

“I’m going to stop your newspaper delivery,” Bryan announces, his voice as flat and dull as the low-hanging sun that seems desperate to make its way through this morning’s heavy clouds.

“Did I run out of money to buy my newspapers?” I ask. “Am I poor now?”

“Mom, you have enough money in trust to live until you’re a hundred and twenty. Dad left you just fine… you don’t need to worry about money.” Bryan smiles gently in my direction.

“Then why are you taking away my newspapers?” I ask. “Those are
my
newspapers and I
want
them. I need them… for… for newspaper things.” My voice is high and thin with sudden distress at the thought of losing yet one more thing.

“You don’t read them. You don’t even bring them in the house.”

“Well, I’d read them if they were placed here,” I say, patting the top of my coffee table. “They should deliver my newspapers… with coffee, don’t you think? They should ring the doorbell. Maybe I’d open the door if people had the common courtesy that God gave a duck to let me know they’re here. With coffee.”

My children look at me as if I’m a stranger. A stranger with dust and gum in her head.

“So it’s settled,” I say. “If I
do
have money then I should have my newspapers, with coffee… and maybe a nice blueberry scone.” I narrow my eyes. “Or maybe you’re not telling me the truth about my money and I
am
poor.”

“Mom, listen to me… this isn’t about money.” Bryan looks wounded as if I’ve just questioned his manhood. “All this is about is that you don’t pick your newspapers up off the porch.”

“Then I want you to call the newspaper people and tell them to bring coffee and scones with my newspaper. I’ll pick them up then.” I punctuate my declaration with one sharp nod of my head.

“Oh good grief,” Allison says. She shrugs her shoulders and wanders off to putter around my kitchen. I’ve apparently made an appropriate point because Bryan says nothing more. He opens the Sunday paper and hides his face behind its pages.

It’s often like this that my children avoid me. I don’t know why.

Sometime later, Allison comes out from the kitchen and asks me, “Mother, why is there cat food in your cereal bowl?”

YOU DON’T. You don’t know why you would have spooned cat food into your favorite cereal bowl, the red one, the one clearly imprinted with the word Cereal on its side. You want to explain how you know your different bowls, but what’s the point? To you, it doesn’t matter if you feed the cat from your cereal bowl, or if your cereal ends up in the cat’s bowl. A bowl is a bowl. Yet, children still question their befuddled mothers, giving well-meaning discourses about bowls and their proper use (according to the words written across their ceramic sides). You’re no longer compelled to be perfect; your best response is to shrug your shoulders and walk to the center of your living room. There, you shuffle your feet back and forth and hold your head in a posture of shame, even though you don’t know why you do the things you do.

“Mom?” Allison gently shakes my arm, speaking earnestly into my face.

She startles me. “I don’t know,” I say, my voice echoing her earnest tone. I say my words once more for good measure. “I
don’t
know.”

I’m not certain exactly what it is that I don’t know, but I assert my innocence over it all anyway.

“Don’t feed the cat from
your
bowl… and don’t you eat from the cat’s bowl,” Allison says, her eyes wide and serious. “Okay?”

“Okay,” I say. I look up in time to notice Bryan’s eyebrows flip quizzically before resuming his place in the business section of the newspaper.

“That reminds me,” I say. “Do we know what time my coffee and scones are to be delivered? I want to be ready on time. A lady always needs to be dressed, with her make-up on… and certainly, a smile on her face.” My children disappear once again behind their newspapers and kitchen doors.

I return to shuffling back-and-forth in the center of the living room. When one’s head is a fractured stream of nonsense, the middle of a room is a safer place indeed.

After my children leave‌—‌Bryan taking with him a plastic bag with my mail tucked inside and Allison taking the last of my good senses‌—‌I go into my closet to comfort myself with another letter. This time I pull out something that appears to be a poem. I say
appears
because it’s nothing like the somersaulting poetry of Milton or Poe or Joyce or any of the classic writers.

Strangely, reading is something I still do well in spite of this creeping, gathering illness. Maybe it’s because I learned to read at a very young age. I could, perhaps, compare my continued reading ability to an athlete’s muscle memory that, once ingrained, requires little conscious effort or thought to throw a fast ball or kick a field goal‌—‌or in my case, to read a simple sentence. Maybe, in spite of my silly-willy mind, I’m simply making up for all the reading Ma couldn’t do because her eyes were so very broken. I’m not sure which of us received the better bargain, though. I wonder if we each in our own way came to a certain form of blindness. My brain is as blind now as Ma’s eyes had been.

What a sad lot we turned out to be.

As I settle the page in my hands, I decide to dedicate today’s reading to Ma and her eyes.

My darling children:

Here’s a rhyme we used to say now and then. I won’t be sorry for its silly words, because if you think about it, apologies ahead of time only serve to diminish the apologetic. Nevertheless, we made up this rhyme when you were little. We recited it instead of prayers because it made you fall asleep with smiles on your little faces. We called it The Finger Poem and as I recall, it changed every time we said it because we could never remember how it‌—‌The Finger Poem‌—‌went exactly. Here is one way I recall. As you read, try to picture us lacing our fingers together, yours freshly cleaned after bedtime snacks laced with sticky honey and jelly, mine simply enthralled with how I was entrusted with such delicacies to hold. So here it is‌—‌The Finger Poem:

Here are your fingers,

Your whorls and your swirls

Your legacies spinning,

Your waves to the world.

So let’s paint a party and

Give them grand speeches

We’ll sing to the stars

That crawl across beaches.

We’ll give them a dance and

Teach them to Jump!

Lace them like zippers

Zarrimp-a-zarrump.

We’ll cross them in gestures of

Fortune and Luck

All higgledy piggledy,

Chuck-a-ruck-zuk.

We’ll dress them up smartly

In feathers and lizards

And teach them to ride on

The backs of our scissors.

And when they grow old,

And turn wrinkled and bent,

Like ten little grandmas,

We’ll wave them again.

With all love,

Your silly mother

I read my poem and decide it is an utterly ridiculous thing. It makes no sense. I think perhaps I should tear this nonsense into a million unreadable pieces, but then I think about the moment when Allison and Bryan might discover this poem. They might even remember our sweet nights of milky kisses and giggle-faces. That settles it. I refold my nonsensical, laughable rhyme and place it back in the letter box where I found it.

Obviously, I’m in no position to judge.

Chapter Eighteen

I
t’s raining. Allison and Bryan stand at my doorstep, shaking out their umbrellas and smiling at me. “Hi, Mom,” they say, nearly in unison, like twins. I can’t tell if they’re sheepish or impish. They seem to be mostly holes of color in an otherwise gray day of clouds and rain and I can’t figure them out.

The odd appearance of my children causes me to wonder how whole flocks of heavy-winged birds can fly through trees without breaking a single branch and yet I can’t seem to think my way through one simple moment.

“We brought you a girl,” Allison says, a bit too brightly, her mouth smiling a little wider than normal. Her hair swings blonde swipes across an otherwise colorless sky.

“A girl? Whatever will I do with a girl? I can barely take care of myself.”

“Mom, we’re not exactly talking about a girl,” Bryan says. “More like a woman.”

“And just what should I do with a
woman
?”

“That’s the whole point,” Allison says. “You don’t have to do anything. She’ll do everything.”

“Everything?”

“Yes!
Everything
.” Allison beams brightly, her red lips creating another hole in the purple sky.

I decide my children are just being playful. Then a small, dark blue car pulls into the drive and a woman gets out. She waves and smiles.

“Here she is now,” Bryan says almost too brightly for me to keep up with.