The Bird Market of Paris (8 page)

Some of the kids I knew had bars in their houses, or collections of liquor bottles in kitchen cabinets. Sometimes we'd sip the peppermint or peach schnapps, then pour water into the bottle to make up the deficit. I liked the sting and heat, and the way a small taste pirouetted to my head.

One mom I knew was drunk all the time. She was the wife of a drug dealer who bought Ferraris from my dad, so it was easy to steal booze from the wet bar by the pool when my dad took me there to spend the night with the drug dealer's three redheaded daughters. Once, their mom, all cheetah print pants and off-the-shoulder T-shirt, staggered into the bedroom where we were sprawled in front of the television, and slurred, “Are you girls listening to Jeff Leper?” We had Duran Duran's “Girls on Film” video playing on MTV, but we knew she meant Def Leppard and we laughed. I liked taking sips of alcohol, but I never wanted to get
that
kind of drunk.

My parents didn't toss vodka into plants like Poppy did. They didn't drink vodka. They drank beer and wine. Beer was disgusting, and I couldn't drink half a bottle of wine, pour water into it, and expect to escape notice. There was no way to sneak alcohol at home, but my parents had a “European” idea about the relationship between children and alcohol: they thought if they made it off-limits when I was young, I'd want it more when I grew up. Working on this theory, I asked for wine every time they drank it. At a restaurant, they'd pour a tiny pool of red wine into a wineglass and fill the rest of the glass with water. My dad had been given wine at lunch in grammar school in Paris, and he didn't understand the strange taboo Americans had about alcohol.

I'd study their wineglasses as they sipped, making the wine last through dinner. I gulped my glassful. The wine alchemized the water into a coarse, curly feeling juice that puckered my tongue. I'd ask for another. I could manage ten glasses before my mom cut me off, then I'd spend the next hour melting cocktail straws into the candle on the table, fascinated at how they disappeared as the flame licked the red plastic.

Just before Christmas, the year I turned thirteen, I asked Poppy to sew me a raw silk black-and-white pinstriped pleated skirt for a holiday party my parents and I attended every year at their friends' home in Coral Gables. Poppy sewed beautiful one-of-a-kind clothes for me whenever I needed something to wear for a party or the science fair at school. I had seen the black-and-white silk in his studio and loved the way it felt, soft and nubby, with enough starchiness to keep the pleats neat. My mom liked to dress me like a little girl, in baby doll dresses; that year, even though I didn't own a bra yet, I wanted something grown-up.

I paired the new pinstriped skirt—which I loved—with a red sweater, white tights, and black patent leather Mary Janes. I wasn't allowed to wear makeup, but I did have lip gloss, so I shined my lips and scrunched my hair into ringlets, appearing like a child in the mirror. I had been aiming at teenager.

The party was held at a large home with a hacienda feel, sliding glass doors and plate glass windows overlooking a central courtyard with a stone fountain. Terra-cotta flagstones led us from the driveway to the courtyard into the Christmas party, me hopping from stone to stone as if they were a hopscotch grid. My shiny Mary Janes reflected the blinking holiday lights, and I felt fancy in the silk skirt. Other guests wore slinky gold camisoles and tailored blazers, their jewelry glinting like sunlight on water. It was a party out of a TV commercial, revelers' heads tossed back, mouths open in laughter, almost in slow motion.

A waiter with a tray of champagne glasses greeted us. The blonde liquid imitated the lights from the Christmas tree and sparkled red, green, and gold, blinking and bubbling. I gazed at the array of glasses, and one of my earliest memories projected onto the tray—me at five years old, holding my mom's hand at the Museum of Modern Art in New York City, van Gogh's
Starry Night
hanging far above my head, feeling transported by the yellow swirls against a sea of raven blue, not having words for the vision, only awe.

I reached for a glass of champagne.

“What are you doing?” My mom tried to seize the glass, so I gripped it harder.

My dad waved a hand in the air, as if to clear away smoke. “Let her have it,” he said. “It's fine. It's Christmas.”

My mom looked at me as if to say, “You got away with it this time,” then released my glass.

The champagne lit my throat and chest. I liked the way the bubbles felt on my lips and the way the glass looked in my hand, like a crystal flower. I felt imbued with grown-up-ishness.

I assessed the situation. If I walked around the party, away from my parents, and gulped this glass of champagne, I could grab another from a cruising waiter and make it seem like the same glass. My parents were preoccupied at parties; this was going to be easy. I slipped away from my mom, drank my first glass and pinched another from a tray, toured the courtyard, and did it again. Then again. I met my mom at the buffet table and piled a red plastic plate full of spiral-cut ham and baby quiches.

“Is that the same glass?” my mom asked. She squinted her eyes at me. She knew it wasn't.

I reeled to the bar, tended by my childhood acquaintances, two boys three years older than I was, kids of my parents' friends. On earlier occasions, they had delighted in covering themselves in ketchup and chasing me all over their houses, screaming that they had been stabbed and that the ketchup was blood. They'd terrified me. Now, behind the bar, they seemed like adults, though they couldn't have been more than sixteen. They asked what I was drinking and I told them.

“Here, try this,” one of them said, handing me a squat glass filled with ice and dark soda.

“What is it?” I said, smelling the drink.

“Rum and Coke.”

The drink was sweet, but I winced from the rum. It tasted like lightning.

I sprawled on a bed in a dark room, pink satin comforter and pink and white pillows beneath my head. My shoes were off. A dim light in the room radiated from the open bathroom door. The ceiling spun. No, the bed spun. No, the entire room spun, in tight circles. The bed lifted off the floor and revolved when I closed my eyes. I opened my eyes and the bed landed with a clunk. I moaned and called out for my mom, but the walls swallowed my voice.

Then came the projectile vomit onto the bed with the pink satin comforter, onto the pink plush carpeting, and all over the pink striped wallpaper. I sat up with vomit on my hands and face. Another wave of sickness. I fell off the bed and crawled to the bathroom, vomiting honey baked ham and quiche on the way, and vomited on the white tiled bathroom floor before making it to the toilet. I rested my head on the cool seat and vomited into the toilet and all over it.

Someone woke me up after I don't know how long. I had fallen asleep—or passed out—on the bathroom floor. The outline of the lady who owned the house appeared, a blurred vision dazzled by the mirror's vanity lights. My mom stood behind her.

Then it was morning. I didn't remember how I arrived home or how I had gotten into an oversized white T-shirt. The ends of my hair were crusty. My beautiful pinstriped skirt hung over my desk chair, rumpled and covered in vomit. The corner of the room spun a little and my tongue felt hairy.

“Hey, Miss Champagne,” my dad said as I shuffled into the living room. He sat on the couch smoking a cigarette, leafing through
The Boat Trader
. “How many glasses did you have last night?”

“I don't know,” I croaked, holding my forehead, afraid to look at him.

“You threw up all over their room.”

“I know,” I said, waiting for my punishment. Maybe I'd have to go back and clean it up.

“That'll teach you. You can't handle your liquor.” He patted the couch and I plopped down beside him. “What did you drink?”

“I had champagne and then the boys gave me a rum and Coke.”

“There you go,” he said. “Never,
ever
, mix alcohols. That's what got you sick.”

We weren't invited to that party again.

But it was not
my
last party. I attended George Washington Carver Junior High for seventh grade, then Ponce de Leon for eighth, and finally Miami Palmetto for ninth, and I drank as much as I could in those years, sneaking sips from other kids' parents' stocked bars. During my three years at Miami Palmetto Senior High School, my friends and I bribed people outside of convenience stores to buy us Boone's Farm Strawberry Hill wine and Bartles & Jaymes wine coolers. We drank in cars, at movies, at the planetarium during Pink Floyd laser light shows, and even at lunchtime during school. High school went by in a blur of Thunderbird and Mad Dog 20/20. Despite all the vomiting and violated curfews, I did manage to graduate.

*   *   *

I drank on weekends in college, prime drinking years for most students, but because I had the birds I didn't need the distraction of great quantities of alcohol, and I couldn't take good care of my baby birds if I was drunk. As my bird breeding hobby grew, drinking became less of an activity for me. I didn't have many friends to drink with anyway. The birds weren't ersatz friends—they were true compatriots.

My parents indulged my bird hobby. When I brought a bird home—or another fish tank, turtle, or rodent—either my parents wouldn't notice or they'd show interest in the new creatures. If I brought a dog into the house—which I did many times, scooping strays off the street—they wouldn't let the mutt past the threshold. We'd had Dobermans and a Pomeranian when I was younger, but my folks were done with dogs. If I tried bringing another kitten home—we had four cats already—their fingers pointed to the door before I could say, “Can we keep him?” My parents both loved animals, and my dad was particularly emotionally invested in our cat, Gladys, calling her name every day the
second
he stepped into the front door after work, waiting for her to curl around his legs and say hello in her emphatic Burmese yowl. So I couldn't understand why
more
didn't equal
better
. I'd call Poppy in tears, begging him to reason with my parents about a new kitten or stray dog, but he'd defer to them and instruct me to respect my parents' wishes.

 

Chapter 8

After graduating from community college with an associate's degree in liberal arts, I began studies at Florida International University, and sat in the front row of my literature class. The professor stood near the blackboard discussing
The Handmaid's Tale
by Margaret Atwood, a dystopian novel about the oppression of women, when my clutch of lovebird babies cheeped simultaneously inside the plastic critter keeper under my desk. There was no mistaking the ratcheting cry of baby birds. I tapped the container with my fingernail and the cheeping ceased. My professor stopped talking, scanned the room, and resumed lecturing.

In unison, the baby birds tattled on me again. I tapped their container and they quieted. The professor glared at me.

“What's going on?” she said, the open novel limp in her hand.

“Sorry, I have baby birds,” I said. I was a little embarrassed, but mostly anxious. My babies were hungry.

She squinted at me. “You're the strangest student I've ever had,” she said, before turning back to the chalkboard.

After class, I crossed the grassy quad to the cafeteria. I filled a cup with hot water meant for tea and carried it, along with my babies and my backpack, to a table far from the cashiers. I stirred the mustard-colored powdered hand-feeding formula into the hot water until it reached a gruel-like consistency, then added a spoonful of banana and yams baby food to the concoction, and half a teaspoon of peanut butter. I tested the formula against my upper lip to gauge the temperature.

My six lovebird babies stretched their necks and cheeped like scratchy records when I opened the critter keeper. They were three and four weeks old, covered in downy fluff, their black eyes open, specks of contour feathers threatening to burst from their skin. Each had the beginnings of wings and a tail, the vivid blues, greens, and yellows startling against their baby fluff.

Lovebird babies always feather out the same way: first the wings, head, and tail, and last the body. As the feathers grow, the little downy puff of feather fluff preceding the feather stays glued on at the tip, a remnant of the juvenile downy coat that kept the baby warm before its feathers emerged. This piece of fluff eventually falls off, or I'd pick it off. If the baby was a green mutation the fluff was pinkish at first, and if it was a blue mutation, the fluff was white. Juvenile lovebirds also have a dark top mandible (the top of the beak) that lightens as the bird matures, which is a good way to tell the adults from the juveniles.

I placed several napkins onto the table and removed the babies from the plastic container, then filled a needle-less syringe with formula and placed it inside each baby's beak. The babies pumped their little heads up and down, swallowing the formula until their crops filled like balloons. Most birds have a crop, a stretchy, saclike organ below the esophagus. Below that is the proventriculus, which secretes enzymes to help digest the food, which then travels to the gizzard, a muscular stomach that grinds the hard food birds typically eat. I stopped feeding before their crops became too full—the crop can become stretched, and bacteria may grow in the crevices.

Once the babies ate, they clumped themselves inside the critter keeper and fell asleep on top of one another in a pile of skin and feet. I arrived late for my philosophy class, but at least my babies wouldn't interrupt our discussion of Aristotle.

Maybe I
was
a weird student. Bonk had become the be-all and end-all of birdness for me, and I had embarked on a search for that kind of love in everything feathered from then on, mostly in the form of lovebirds, the purest form of love and grace I had ever known. Someone left a well-behaved red-lored Amazon parrot named Miami Bird with me for boarding and never picked her up, so I added her to my flock. She taught a lot of the lovebirds to catcall, and I spent hours training her to do a variety of tricks, from spinning on her perch to waving hello.