The Bird Market of Paris (16 page)

“We will deal with it tomorrow. Go back to bed, you must be tired.”

The next day I found a limestone rock to use as the baby's marker. Poppy and I dug a tiny hole and gave the twin back to the earth. Poppy said a prayer in Hebrew as I placed the rock over the baby's grave. I had an aversion to human funerals, but felt that animal funerals were important.

The other twin thrived. I named her Little Miss Mango because when she feathered out her colors resembled the tropical fruit: yellow body tinged with green, and a red beak, which she wielded as a weapon in one moment and kissed with gently in the next. As her personality emerged, she showed herself to be a sassy creature—smart, fiercely loyal, and affectionate. She grew into one of my best friends, like Bonk: invaluable and irreplaceable. Twins from one egg must happen as often as two moons around one planet, which is to say
it happens
, but no one I knew had ever seen it before.

 

Chapter 13

When I applied to New York University in the spring of 1995, I never believed I'd be accepted, but I was, and in late summer, my writer/bartender boyfriend agreed to drive me to New York City so I could begin graduate school in creative writing, with a poetry focus. I'd had terrible grades in high school and not much better at Miami Dade Community College, but they had improved once I took a few English classes at Florida International University. I think the weight of the graduate application rested on my writing sample: ten pages of poems, mostly about birds. I wanted to study at NYU because of Sharon Olds, a poet whose work explored depths I also wanted to plumb, a soft-spoken woman who penned dark, sexy, semiconfessional free verse pocked with curse words. I was twenty-four, and this would be my first foray into living as an adult in the real world.

I packed the rental car to the roof with black plastic bags filled with clothes and linens, and a giant cooler and boxes filled with food. I was afraid I wouldn't be able to find food in New York City and I'd starve before classes began. I brought dozens of cans of tuna, chocolate and granola bars, Cup Noodles, cereal, and beef jerky—as if I were going camping in the mountains for months. My dad chuckled when he saw the car. He promised me there was food in New York, but he couldn't convince me to leave anything behind.

Pets weren't allowed in the graduate dorm, so my mom and Poppy said they'd care for the birds while I was gone. I removed all nest boxes and anything else that would prompt breeding. My mom requested that I thin my flock, so I reluctantly rehomed some of the birds, my brood winging from my grasp again. I said a special good-bye to Bonk, telling her to be a good girl, kissing her all over her beak and head, and begged Poppy to pay special attention to her.

A few hours before my departure, Poppy walked into my room and closed the door.

“You are my hope,
Chérie
,” he said.

“I know, Poppy.”

“Call me every day. Do not talk to strangers. The world is a hard place for a sensitive girl. There are hunters out there.”

“I know, Poppy.”

“You can come home any time you want if you do not like it.”

“I know, Poppy.”

“You know everything,
Chérie
.”

“I know, Poppy.”

He grasped his bushy eyebrows at the outside edges and curled them upward.

“Don't do that!” I said, and squealed like I was eight years old.

He grimaced, formed his hands into claws, opened his eyes wide, then stepped toward me with a zombie's gait. I screamed and leapt over the bed, tore open the bedroom door, and ran across the house, Poppy right behind me. I flung myself on the couch, where he cornered me, and the tickling commenced.

“Be careful,” Poppy said, hugging me. Poppy pointed at my writer/bartender boyfriend. “Drive slow. You are carrying precious cargo.”

I waved at my parents and Poppy, and kept waving as we rounded the block and they disappeared from sight.

“You can stop waving now,” my boyfriend said as we pulled north onto U.S. 1.

By the time we crossed the Mason-Dixon line, we had decided to loosen the binds on our arrangement, realizing that thirteen hundred miles would eventually rend the delicate fabric of our relationship, which was knit more with the threads of loneliness than with strands of anything as strong as love.

*   *   *

My first day in New York City, my first moment as a real adult in the real world, I sat on my narrow dorm room bed and, instead of chirping, whistling, and screaming, I heard my own thoughts in chaotic layers, each like a line on a graph. On one line I was elated to be on my own. On another line a voice said that I hated it here and I'd fail at whatever I tried. Another reported I was thirsty, and another said I'd be killed in a random act of violence. Another played the chorus from ABBA's “Dancing Queen” over and over.

The worst line told me to jump out of the window. My twenty-fourth-floor dorm room had a north-facing window overlooking Midtown, including the Empire State Building, a million-dollar view of Manhattan.

Jump out the window
, the voice insisted.
Jump out the window. Jump out the window. Jump out the window
.

I opened the window wide and wondered how the dorm could allow the windows on the high floors to open all the way. I could hang one leg over the sill, then the other, and push off, flying for one pure moment until the ground caught me in its unforgiving arms.

I decided to wander around my new neighborhood near Murray Hill and drown my anxiety with vodka. A drink would smooth out the ruffles. Hallelujah.

My parents had told me New York City might be overwhelming; instead, I found its street life exhilarating, a new metaphor waiting on every corner. The city's frenetic energy tamped my racing thoughts, and I could concentrate instead on people arguing on street corners and pigeons gathering to peck more holes in a bagel. My neighborhood smelled like curry, and the air was engaged with wailing ambulances.

On my very first day in my new 'hood I found a liquor store and bought a bottle of vodka and a green glass gallon of cheap port wine. Back in the dorm, my suite mate was unpacking her boxes. She was a pale, slight girl from Yale working on a PhD in medieval studies. I offered her a drink and she declined, so I closed myself into my room and started on the bottles.

A few days later I attended my first poetry workshop with Sharon Olds. I made friends in class and we drank at the Cedar Tavern on University Place, or in the dark bars lining Second Avenue and the Bowery. I made friends in the dorm, too, and we drank in the evenings. My writer friends and I enticed strangers on the street to play Red Rover with us. We held hands in a circle around the giant cube at Astor Place during a lunar eclipse and sang '80s rock tunes. We traveled toward Avenue C to the Nuyorican Poets Café most Wednesdays and Fridays to drink and rate the poets reading in the slam, or read our own work and hoped not to be heckled.

Poppy and I spoke on the phone almost every day. He told me about his wins at the racetrack, his backgammon games with friends, and his walks on the beach near sunset, playing paddleball with Canadian tourists. My mom placed the phone near Bonk's cage during each call, too.

“Hi, Bonky! I love you!” I'd yell into the phone, clicking and whistling to her. I hoped she knew I was on the other end, though I doubted it.

Still a pet store junkie, I stalked the pet stores in my area to check on the well-being of the birds, like the undercover avian police. I found a sick lovebird in a chain store on one of my rounds. Employees in these stores typically don't know the difference between a bird and a shoe, so when I asked about him they didn't have any answers. He sat on the bottom of the cage, puffy, sticky, and ruffled.

I bought him, then snuck him into the dorm and called Dr. Z.

“What did I tell you about going into pet stores?” she asked. “You can't control yourself.”

“I know,” I whined. “But I have him and he's sick.”

“I'll mail you some medicine and write it in your flock file. And don't tell anyone I'm sending you medicine. It's illegal.”

“I won't,” I said, relieved that I'd saved this bird, who looked like Bonk but was not as friendly.

“You need to find a husband,” Dr. Z said. “I'm going to find you one, because you aren't doing a good job by yourself.”

“I'm working on it.” I'd been on a few dates, but nothing had stuck.

“Work harder.”

The medicine arrived a few days later, and my new lovebird friend, Guillermo, perked up and became bright and mischievous. I'm sure the other residents heard him chirping, but no one reported me. He lived in my room, chewing my books and inspiring my poems.

I was turning in papers and poems on time, and even teaching a few days a week at a preschool in Union Square, but one night after a few martinis, I alienated my poet friends by insisting that someone carry my backpack because my shoulders ached. After no one volunteered, I screamed at them and hailed a cab, never to speak to most of them again.

A voice still nagged me about the hurricane birds, reminding me that I'd killed them, urging me to step off the ledge of my dorm room's window. Only a giant glass of port wine at the end of the day silenced that voice.

I didn't realize it then, but daily drinking was manipulating my brain chemistry and damaging my central nervous system. I overreacted and took everything personally, from critiques on my poems to someone stealing a cab. I believed that if I felt angry, sad, or slighted, I'd feel that way forever. If something was unbearable, in my skewed thinking, it would be unbearable in perpetuity. I woke Poppy at all hours of the night, in tears on the phone—about stomachaches, the cold dampness outside, and the fact that I missed him.

Once, after a rain shower, I saw a rainbow in the clouds over Queens, and the sight made me shrivel into a corner and cry, so hurt by its beauty and transience—in a moment, it would be gone, and I couldn't reason that it was just the effect of light on water. When I saw someone eating an ice cream cone, especially a child or an old person, I'd weep in public. The ice cream cone was a fleeting pleasure. Soon the old person would be dead. And the child was naive to the hideousness of our ultimate fate. If I ever saw Poppy eating an ice cream cone again I'd turn to ash and blow away. I didn't share any of this with anyone. I knew it was crazy.

During my first-year holiday break, my drinking leveled off. Happy to be with Poppy and the birds, I drank far less. After the break, I returned to NYU to study with Galway Kinnell, a handsome Pulitzer Prize winner with a slight Irish brogue who wrote about practical things with such dexterity that they became almost occult. My drinking increased, as did my mood swings and irrational thoughts. The voice in my head beckoned me to take the big leap and fly through the twenty-fourth-floor window.

My second year at grad school, I was a resident assistant, a gig that came with a private dorm room in an undergraduate building in the heart of the East Village and five meals a week in exchange for playing “dorm mom” to the students and throwing pizza parties. I took poetry workshops in the evenings with Galway Kinnell and with Bill Matthews, another quick-witted poet I admired, and I drank to excess every night after class, sometimes by myself, sometimes with the underage sophomores who lived on my floor. My outsides appeared normal, but my mind frayed with each drink like silk in a washing machine. I bought a large aquatic turtle in Chinatown, named him Swimmy, and kept him in a giant plastic bin filled with water. This quiet friend reminded me of what I desperately wanted—a hard, protective shell.

 

Chapter 14

When I arrived home for spring break during my second year of graduate school, I found Bonk sitting on the bottom of her cage, feathers fluffed. She waddled to the side of the cage to greet me, chirping, whistling, and clicking as usual, but she didn't look right; she was too puffy and a little dirty. Healthy birds keep their feathers clean. Her belly was distended and she had gray discharge on her vent.

“How long has Bonk been like this?” I asked my mom.

“Been like what?”

“Bonk is sick,” I told her. “Can't you tell?”

“I guess I couldn't. She seemed the same to me.”

I called Dr. Z and Bonk and I were in her office within half an hour. I was distraught.

“Bonk is egg-bound,” Dr. Z said after examining her.

“Oh my God, she's eggnant,” I said.
Eggnant
is the colloquial term for avian pregnancy. “She's eight years old and I haven't set her up for breeding in a long time.”

“They can breed at this age in good condition,” she said.

“I know, but I didn't want her to try.”

“Too late for that. She's unable to pass the egg. It might break and fester, which, you know, could be fatal.” Dr. Z told me she'd do an egg-arian section and that I should go home. There was nothing I could do. She'd keep Bonk for a few days.

I waited by the phone, nervous, thinking about Bonk's drowned babies and how much she had endured in the storm. I wondered if she remembered watching the water rise, immersing her mate and children. I poured myself a huge glass of wine. Poppy walked into the kitchen, and without saying a word, took the glass from my hand and poured it down the sink. Before I could protest, the phone rang.

“I removed the egg, and that went fine,” Dr. Z said. “But I found cancer in Bonk's uterus. It looked like bright orange granules covering the inside of the organ. I'd say she has three to six months to live, if that. I'm truly sorry. Just make her comfortable.”

I told Poppy the prognosis.

“Bonk is in the hands of God,
Chérie
,” he said. “We will light a candle for her tonight and say a prayer.”

I snuck the bottle of wine into my room and finished it. That night, after the candle and a prayer in Hebrew for Bonk and all our dead, I didn't sleep in the bed, but instead curled up on the floor with no blanket or pillow.