The Bird Market of Paris (20 page)

I wanted to leave. I had to leave. If I watched Poppy fall away into oblivion, I'd go with him. What was my world without Poppy? The hospital bed, the hospice nurse, everyone on deathwatch—it was too much. I couldn't do it.

“I love you, Poppy.”

My mom ushered me away from the bed, and Poppy's hand slid out of mine.

 

Chapter 16

I was heading down Third Avenue toward my dorm, a sack of Chinese takeout in my hand, when one of my combat boots hit the dirty pavement then sank into marshmallow, the sidewalk pliable under my shoe. Looking down, I expected to see my foot immersed in wet cement, but it wasn't. I picked up my other leg to move forward and watched my knee rise toward me, then fade downward, but the pavement still felt like syrup. Euphoria climbed my body in a wave and reached the top of my head, which tingled under my hat.

I knew Poppy had died.

I sprang toward the dorm and into the back office to check my mail, passing my boss sitting inside one of the offices with her colleague.

“Hey, there,” I trilled, waving as I passed. I still couldn't feel my legs and my head felt as if it were going to float off my neck like a balloon. I hadn't greeted them like that before and they laughed as I passed.

My voice mail had two messages, both from my mom. I dialed her number.

“Your grandfather passed away about fifteen minutes ago,” she said, talking low, as if avoiding an avalanche.

“We were all around him, holding his hand. He took a last breath and passed on. It was peaceful. I'll call you back when we make arrangements.”

The city murmured outside my window—sirens, a lady screaming, dogs yapping. I opened the window and regarded the pavement. All this noise, these lives proceeding and maneuvering around Poppy's death like a bicycle around a pothole.

I headed to St. Mark's Ale House, where the bartender poured heavy, ordered a vodka martini, dirty, three olives, downed it in two gulps and ordered another before my lips dried. It was noon. I ordered a third martini, and halfway through the drink a dark body floated to the surface and broke the crust of my denial, a reflection so true, so definite and merciless that I felt a sharp pain in my chest:
Was it possible that I was responsible for Poppy's death?
Were we like a bonded pair of birds who languished when the other disappeared? I drained my drink and ordered another.

On my way back to the dorm I detoured into a liquor store for a gallon jug of port wine. In my room, I listened to a message from my mom telling me to buy an Amtrak ticket to come home for Poppy's funeral.
Jump out the window
, the voice said.
You killed the birds and you killed Poppy. Jump out the window.

The voice pushed through the martinis like a weed through the sidewalk, pushing me toward the ledge.
Jump out the window
, the voice said.

I didn't want to know what the world was like without Poppy. I opened the window. Cold air slapped my face.

Jump
, the voice said.
Jump out the window.

I leaned out. Tiny people milled on the sidewalk below. How would my body look there, sprawled akimbo, a puddle of blood from my head trailing over the sidewalk's lip and into the gutter? A girl would scream and cover her eyes and her boyfriend would pull her into his chest and hold her. People would stand around me, shaking their heads.

I didn't understand death. To me, when someone died, it was the same as if they had decided to take a long vacation on a tropical island where there was no phone and no way to contact anyone, but they were fine. Maybe better than fine. Weren't they like birds with the cage door open?

I closed the window and staggered to the bed, opened the port wine and drank from the bottle, pondering a way to ask my boss if I could return home for Poppy's funeral. I steeled myself, slapping my cheeks so I wouldn't sound intoxicated, and called her.

“You'll have to see if someone will switch hours with you,” she said.

I left a message with each of the other nineteen RAs in the dorm to see if someone would swap on-call hours with me, then poured port wine into a glass and slithered into bed with my clothes on. I stared at the ceiling. My Poppy was dead.

Jump out the window
.

I pulled the covers over my head and wept. I didn't want to jump out the window, but maybe I wouldn't have a choice.

I awoke still in my clothes, the glass of port wine in my hand, a red, sticky stain on my pillowcase and in my hair. My phone had no messages. The funeral was in two days. I called the other RAs again.

“I'm leaving another message because no one got back to me. My grandfather died and I have to get back for the funeral. Please, please, please, will someone switch hours with me? It's important. I can't miss it.”

I poured myself a glass of port wine and a bowl of cereal.

Jump out the window. Jump out the window. Jump out the window
.

An hour later, my boss called. “Some of the RAs called to complain that you're leaving messages trying to make them feel sorry for you. You need to stop. If no one wants to switch hours with you, there's nothing I can do,” she said. “Maybe you should take some time off. Reconsider what you want in life.”

“I'm in the middle of a semester. I need this job to graduate. I came back, even when my grandfather was sick.”

“Maybe this isn't the right time for you to be in school.”

“All I'm asking is to go to my grandfather's funeral.”

“If you miss your hours you're out of a job and out of your room. We have your key and I can have your things put out on the street. You have a free ride with this job, and you're not going to have it for long.”

“I've taken out a lot of student loans to be here. I'm not on a free ride.”

“I'm going to have to say
no
,” she said. I thought I could hear a sadistic glee in her voice, like a schoolyard bully tearing up a weaker kid's homework.

I called my mom and told her I couldn't come home. I thought she would argue or protest, but she didn't. Years later, I realized that I should have sent my urgent request to someone further up on the university payroll instead of imploring people who were one tick above me in the residence hall food chain, working there for room and board like me. But I was afraid. Not only afraid to rock the proverbial boat and lose what I'd built, but also afraid to go to the funeral.

Poppy never wanted me to be sad and told me many times that I should avoid funerals when I could. I'd hated Nona's funeral, but I'd had Poppy there to hold me. I pictured myself standing in the hot grass next to Nona's cemetery plot where Poppy was to be buried, watching everyone I loved cry and toss dirt onto a coffin. I pictured myself jumping into the hole with Poppy, begging them to shovel the dirt over me, too.

My mom asked me to write a eulogy for Poppy. I sat at my tiny wooden dorm room desk with a pen and jabbed myself in the leg with the pen's felt tip until I created hundreds of little round marks, as if I had a terrible pox. I played connect the dots with the pen marks until my leg had vines and flowers and birds all over it.

I opened a blank journal and recalled Bella's diary dedicated to Poppy, the florid admissions of love for a married man. She didn't know Poppy like I did. How could she? We had the truest kind of love, grandparent to child, no obstacles. I wrote about what Poppy meant to me, compared him to our birds, and used images of him flying. I drank port wine and called my mom and read the eulogy to her. In a few places she said it made him sound like Jesus or some kind of saint. I agreed to tone it down, but didn't agree that my sentiments were misguided.

*   *   *

A few days after the funeral, my mom said that she and my dad had discussed my going to therapy so I could talk about Poppy's death. I wasn't reacting like someone in mourning, they said. I wasn't reacting at all.

The NYU health clinic gave students counseling services once a week for free, so I called for an appointment. I felt neutral about therapy, not knowing much about it. I wouldn't tell anyone the truth about everything I thought and felt. I didn't want anyone to think I was crazy, after all.

My counselor was a neat, square-shaped woman in her fifties, with long brown hair streaked with silver. She wore chunky turquoise jewelry. I thought we'd jump in talking about Poppy, but instead she wanted to ask me dozens of questions as an evaluation—standard practice for a first session and NYU's policy, she explained. I took a deep breath, ready for the interview. She asked me about my background and my family life, my time at school, and other benign questions. Then she asked me about my drinking.

“Do you drink alcohol?”

“Yes.”

“How many drinks a week do you have?”

I asked her what she considered to be “a drink.”

She asked me what
I
considered to be “a drink.”

I said that one drink was contained in one glass.

“Does the size of the glass matter?”

“No,” I said.

“A drink in a shot glass and a drink in a fishbowl would both constitute one drink?”

I imagined what a drink in a fishbowl would be like and smiled. I told her yes.

She said one drink was either twelve ounces of beer, a regular glass of wine, or one ounce of hard liquor.

I closed my eyes and catalogued my weekly drinking. I figured the number at about sixty drinks, accounting for ten to twelve drinks on each weekend day, and about five drinks on each weekday, more or less, but often more. Sixty sounded like a lot, so I cut it in half.

“Thirty,” I said.

She fished inside a drawer and handed me a piece of paper.

“Read this and let's discuss your answers.”

The paper contained twenty questions. I read each aloud. All of them were about alcohol. When I was done, I stared into her face to see if I had passed or failed.

“If you answered more than three questions with a ‘yes,' you're considered an alcoholic,” she said. “You answered yes to seventeen of them.”

I was here to talk about Poppy, not my drinking, and this lady was shining a light on my messy place.

“Do you feel you drink too much?”

“I drink as much as everyone else. I'm here to talk about my grandfather.”

“Most people don't have thirty drinks a week,” she said.

“Maybe it's not that many,” I said. “How many drinks a week do
you
have?”

“Keep that piece of paper and try to be aware of your drinking,” she said. I folded the piece of paper and placed it into my purse. “Do you drink to have fun, or when something is bothering you?”

She was picking at my sensitive spot, and it hurt. “A voice keeps telling me to jump out the window,” I said, hoping to send her in another direction.

She straightened in her chair. “A voice?”

“It says
jump out the window, jump out the window, jump out the window
, over and over, and it won't stop.”

“Do you
hear
the voice?”

“I don't
hear
it. It's
my
voice, but I can't control it.”

“Do you
want
to jump out the window or are you
afraid
that you will?”

“I'm afraid I will.”

“You won't jump out the window.”

“How do you know?” I said, surprised at her certainty.

“It sounds like an intrusive thought, and people rarely do the things the intrusive thoughts say to do. It's more annoying than real. If the thought told you to kill someone, would you?”

“No,” I said.

“You won't jump out the window, either.” She glanced at the clock. “We have to stop now, but keep an eye on your drinking and we'll talk about it next week.”

I told her I would, knowing I'd never return.

Back in my dorm room, I tacked the piece of paper she gave me onto my bulletin board. It was funny. I was an alcoholic, diagnosed by a real psychologist.

When friends tried to cut me off at the bar or wanted to go home, I'd yell, “I'm an alcoholic! I need more drinks!” I wanted to design an “I'm an alcoholic” T-shirt and wear it to bars.

The psychologist's ideas and her flimsy piece of paper were outdated. Didn't she know that young people drink? Who created this ridiculous questionnaire, anyway? I wasn't about to give up alcohol. I was a
writer
.

I photocopied the paper and carried it with me wherever I went, using it as a kind of drinking game. Everyone I knew in grad school failed the test. No wonder I drank so much. I had a reason—or, rather, an excuse. I could drink as much as I wanted. I was an alcoholic. That explained everything.

 

Chapter 17

After I'd graduated from NYU with a master of arts in poetry, Indiana University accepted me into their creative writing program, where I could earn a Master of Fine Arts in poetry. At Indiana, my teachers and writing workshops made university life gratifying. I loved my students and I wrote copiously. I found a private house to rent in Bloomington so I didn't have to follow dorm rules; I culled my “best friend” birds—Bonk and Sweetie, Little Miss Mango, Jesse, and a few other lovebirds from the flock I'd left with my parents—to live with me.

Still, not even two winters in New York City had prepared this Florida girl for a Midwestern winter. Stuck inside, I longed for a glimpse of the sun. I graded papers, wrote poems, and penned long, handwritten letters to my best friend in Miami, Richard Blanco, who had just won the Agnes Lynch Starrett Prize from the University of Pittsburgh Press for the publication of his first book of poems,
City of a Hundred Fires
. And I drank.

Just prior to moving to Bloomington, I had tossed out the idea that I was a
real
alcoholic based on twenty questions on a piece of paper. I knew what a
real
alcoholic was: someone who drank before five p.m.—which I didn't do. After a few months in Bloomington, I declared two p.m. the proper drinking time, and by the end of my second semester, I downgraded cocktail hour to eleven a.m. You were definitely an alcoholic if you drank before eleven a.m. I never did that.