The Bird Market of Paris (5 page)

My parents collected down-on-their-luck drunks the way some people collect dogs from the pound—they felt sorry for these people, who didn't have homes or bright prospects. But the couch drunks took attention away from me, and my parents bought them drinks with money I thought would be better spent on fashionable shoes for me so the kids at school wouldn't put gum in my hair anymore. The couch drunks were down on their luck through every fault of their own, it appeared, but they amused my parents, whose bustling social circle was open to the Ferrari contingent, the hardworking rank and file,
and
the down-and-out, as long as the people were witty, intelligent, and told great stories. The couch drunks were always gracious to me, extending themselves as friends, but I was suspicious of anyone who seemed to be scamming my parents and keeping them out all night. After a few weeks or a year, each couch drunk would move on to drunker pastures, and another would take his place.

“Uncle Fitch,” who slept on our couch off and on, was a purveyor of funny cigarettes, among other substances. He was scruffy, with a huge handlebar mustache, and spoke in a growling baritone, as if he had gargled with nails. Uncle Fitch had a mean aura that wavered around him like heat waves on asphalt in summer. He told stories about deadly bar fights and drug smuggling that entertained my dad as they drank together.

“Little girl, get me a beer!” was Uncle Fitch's battle cry as he pointed to the fridge, snapping his fingers. I'd race to the kitchen, grab a green glass bottle of St. Pauli Girl, and ferry it to him.

“Not cold enough,” he'd contend, and snap those nicotine-stained fingers again, handing the beer back to me. “And get your father one, too.”

Uncle Fitch left our couch after a year and moved in with a woman he'd met at the Taurus. We visited him at a little house in the middle of an avocado grove at the end of a long gravel driveway. Avocado trees whispered in the darkness. The naked yellow porch light, drowning in moths, was the one spark in a chasm of pitch and sighing leaves on either side of us.

Fitch was ensconced in a La-Z-Boy recliner, a walking cane leaning on the chair, an empty beer in front of him. He had mouthed off to a group of teenagers at Haulover Beach and they'd beaten him with baseball bats, putting him in the hospital for weeks.

“Hey, hey!” Fitch bellowed. “Come on in.”

A dark-haired, mousy woman with an expressionless face appeared in the kitchen doorway and Fitch introduced her to us as if she were a piece of furniture. “Get us some beers, woman,” he ordered. She disappeared.

“Kids, come here,” Fitch spat, and two skinny, dark-haired kids appeared, a girl and a boy, perhaps twelve and ten years old. He introduced them as the woman's kids. They stood close together, four feet away from Fitch, arms at their sides like soldiers, staring at the floor. Fitch snapped his fingers and pointed at his shoe.

“Get on your knees and tighten my laces,” he said. The little boy dove at Fitch's right shoe. The boy didn't look up at Fitch, just untied both of his shoes and retied them. Fitch didn't like the way the boy had tied one of his shoes, and ordered that he tie it again.

“You see,” Fitch said, “I have them all in line.”

I pitied those kids. I imagined their terrified life with Uncle Fitch, and I was glad it wasn't mine. Later, Fitch was sent to jail for attempted murder of the kids' mother. He had shot at her with a rifle as she ran from him through the avocado grove, bullets hitting only trees. In my early twenties, my dad told me that Fitch had died homeless on a mattress in an abandoned building, an empty bottle of scotch and a bottle of painkillers near his head. I felt sad for him, but kind of relieved for the world.

*   *   *

Poppy hated the couch drunks. “That bloody sycamore,” he'd hiss under his breath when he encountered one of them. “Bloody sycamore” was Poppy's favorite substitute curse phrase. He was as dry of expletives as he was of alcohol, at least in a language I understood; he cursed liberally in Arabic when someone cut him off on the road.

He said to me, many times, finger pointing to the sky in a kind of oath, “
Chérie
, I never took a drink in my life.” He loathed taking pills, too, in practice and as a concept, and called people who took pills—even prescription pills—“pillographers.” He thought doctors were out to poison people.

“Do you know the root of the word
poison
?” he'd ask. I'd shake my head, though he had told me the answer a million and one times. “
Pharmakeia
. Stemming from the Greek. In English, it is where we get the word
pharmacy
.”

During my childhood, Poppy and I often spent Saturdays together at the Surf Club on Miami Beach, where Poppy played in an ongoing backgammon tournament. The Surf Club had a saltwater pool with a high diving board, and two tame capuchin monkeys who swung down from the banyan trees to snatch French fries from my plate. Poppy pointed out an old lady at the bar, an ancient, wrinkled socialite sitting by herself, head bobbing and teeth clenching, and whispered, “She took a lot of drinks, and look what happened to her.”

He greeted the frail woman, called her
mademoiselle
and kissed her hand, and she blushed, batting her eyes at him from under thick, glossy fake eyelashes. Giant circles of rouge shone like identical orange suns on her weathered cheeks. When we walked away, he said, “Such a shame. Look what a drink can do.” We greeted that lady in the same way for years thereafter, having the same conversation about her as we walked toward the cabanas, until one day Poppy told me she had died.

Nona and Poppy were at least three-times-a-week attendees of happy hours in North Miami Beach at any one of a rotation of six hotel or marina bars that served free food to catch the after-work crowd. They both collected Social Security and had drawers full of stolen pink Sweet'N Low packets and paper napkins. Poppy's work had been glamorous, but not as lucrative as it might have looked, and he had a gambling habit, spending long days at the horse and dog tracks. At happy hour, buying one drink entitled Nona and Poppy access to a decent appetizer buffet that served as their dinner. One of the buffets had barbecue ribs and sushi; another had tacos and quesadillas; a third featured a prime rib carving station.

One Friday we showed up at five p.m., few customers other than us in the hotel bar. Poppy, dressed all in white as usual, ushered us to a seat near the buffet.

“Please bring us two Bloody Marys,” he told the waitress, indicating with a gesture that they were for himself and Nona, “With the vodka on the
side
. My little girl will have a soda.”

The waitress appeared with two Bloody Marys, along with two elegant, stemmed shot glasses of vodka, and set them on the table.

“If you order tomato juice,” Poppy said, pointing to the glasses, “it costs four dollars and seventy-five cents. If you order a Bloody Mary with vodka on the side at happy hour, it costs two dollars and seventy-five cents.”

My soda was $3.50. I felt bad that I was too young to order the Bloody Mary with the vodka on the side because it would have saved him seventy-five cents.

Poppy scanned the barroom and, when no one was looking, dumped the vodka shots into a plant behind him. That poor plant. I wondered if the vodka would kill it like it had killed the lady at the Surf Club.

*   *   *

Once, the couch drunks arrived as a couple, a man and his young wife. I overheard that they had moved into town and didn't have a place to stay. I didn't pay much attention to the history of our couch drunks and never asked questions. I didn't want to live symbiotically with them.

After a few nights and a few bottles of wine, the wife came into my room to play with my hamsters. She was pretty and a little chubby, with dark, platter-like eyes, and skin the color of doves. Her face brightened when she held the animals, baby-talking to them, asking me about their ages and what they liked to eat. She strolled the perimeter of my room, admiring my posters of horses, kittens, ducklings, and a shirtless John Stamos in tight leather pants.

“I'm wearing a wig,” she said absently to a poster-size collage I had created from glossy pictures of horses cut from the pages of
Horse Fancy
magazine. The girl pulled on her dark, springy curls and turned to me. “This isn't my real hair.”

She sat on the mattress on the floor in the corner of my room. The fact that I didn't have a
real
bed—one with a frame and a headboard—had traveled around school like a virus after a weekend sleepover, becoming taunting fodder for some of the mean girls, the same girls who called me “PYT” after the Michael Jackson song; instead of “pretty young thing,” they cut the Y, shortened it to “PT,” and changed the meaning to “prostitute.” I hadn't even kissed a boy yet. My dad told me that a man's penis had sharp black barbs that shot from all sides of it, like a porcupine, and if I touched a penis I would experience the worst pain in the world and I'd have to go to the emergency room to have a hand operation to remove the black barbs and he'd
know
I had touched a penis and I'd be in
big
trouble. This information made going anywhere near boys kind of prohibitive. I didn't try to verify his claims, too embarrassed to ask anyone or open an anatomy book in the library.

“Really? That's not your hair?” I said to the couch drunk with the wig. “Can I see?”

She peeled back part of the wig near her forehead, revealing hair lighter than the dark wig's finger curls.

“It looks real,” I said. “Why?”

“The man I'm with … he's not my husband,” she said. “He kidnapped me from my mother. She used to beat me and she put her cigarette out on my neck.” She swept back her wig hair to reveal a faint round scar in the hollow space between her clavicles. I couldn't imagine how a cigarette burn could be that unnoticeable, but I nodded in commiseration anyway.

“I'm thirteen,” she said. “We … go to bed, you know, but we didn't for a long time. He didn't force me or anything.”

My mouth must have been agape. I was also thirteen.

“He's going to buy me two kittens. I want the kittens with six toes,” she said. She gazed at me with big, doleful eyes. “Nobody knows. Please don't tell anyone. He'll get mad.”

“I won't,” I told her. I felt violated, like it was me who had been kidnapped. Did her mother miss her? Was her family searching for her? How did she maneuver around the sharp black barbs shooting from the man's penis? I didn't want to ask.

I guessed I was the only other person in the world, besides her and her kidnapper/husband, who knew their secret, and I knew I should tell someone, but a secret was sacred, and at thirteen, that precept was gospel. I felt sorry for the girl, but also envious. I'd seen her drinking with my parents and her kidnapper/husband, and once I knew her secret, I resented being sent to bed while they continued their party. I was sure my parents didn't know about the couple's charade. Many years later, I finally broke her confidence, and my parents said they'd had no idea she was anything but a young adult.

I placed The Police's
Synchronicity
album onto my record player and set the needle to “Every Breath You Take.” The girl and I sat together, silent, listening to Sting sing his haunting refrain:
I'll be watching you
.

 

Chapter 5

The creature was nothing but a pink curl, knobby on its sides, with silky, pearlescent yellow fluff rising from its back like vagrant weeds in an ill-tended garden. It slept hunched in the hollow of a few tissue papers. Its closed eyes were dark pebbles covered with the thinnest living tissue, arteries pulsing dangerously near the surface of its skin, red and blue highways on a trinket map. The hatchling looked barely contained within its membrane, as if the creature inside could spill out at will and rehatch itself into the world with one great push.

Then one eye squeezed open, glassy and black. The eye seemed knowing. I had thought of the little pink curl as an object; now it was looking at me. Its head popped up and it uttered a rodent-esque squeak, very un-bird-like, then scrunched its head into its neck and shimmied deeper into the tissue paper, falling back asleep.

Minutes before this creature found its way into my hands, I'd heard my boyfriend's Toyota engine whine and then stop with a putter. Out the window, I saw my boyfriend, Peter, walking up the blacktop holding a red-and-silver heart-shaped Mylar balloon that trailed behind him in the wind. I was eighteen years old, and I'd never before had a boyfriend on Valentine's Day. Peter, a student at Miami Dade Community College, where we both attended classes, had made dinner reservations for that night, but then called and asked to drop by a few hours earlier on his way home from work at the pet shop to give me something. In the hand not toting the end of the balloon's string, he held a white coffee mug encircled with a pattern of red hearts.

He thrust the mug at me in the open doorway.

“Happy Valentine's Day,” he said and gave me a kiss. I reached for the mug with both hands, as if he were handing me the Holy Grail, and peered into it.

It definitely wasn't jewelry.

“It's a baby lovebird.” Peter followed me inside. He let go of the balloon and it floated to the ceiling. “For Valentine's Day.”

“I can see that.” I cradled the mug in my hands. I hadn't anticipated this, though it wasn't beyond expectation that he'd give me a pet as a valentine.

I inspected the little parrot sleeping in the mug. I already had my share of pets: a ten-gallon tank of fish, each one named; a fat rabbit I'd found cold and starving under a bush near a soccer field; a dozen Mexican hooded rats; a gerbil; a Florida box tortoise named Swifty; a cage full of prolific zebra finches; and four cats, three of which I'd brought home as kittens—Paisley, the tiny feral gray tabby I picked out of a dumpster; Gladys, the chocolate Burmese someone gave to my dad; Emmeline, the fluffy black and white mute; and Sylvester, a smart tuxedo kitty whom I'd trained to give his paw to shake when asked.