The Bird Market of Paris (9 page)

Naughty little Bonk liked to stand on the books I was studying and shred the tops of each page, so I couldn't sell back my college textbooks. When I typed my term papers she hopped onto the keyboard and picked at the keys until I plucked her back onto my shoulder. She stole the question mark key and I had to glue it back in place.

*   *   *

I spent weekends traveling to bird club meetings and bird shows and expos all over Florida, showing my birds in competitions and winning ribbons and trophies. Sometimes Poppy came with me. The birds took up a generous part of my everyday life. My flock needed to be fed and cleaned every morning, which took well over an hour, and then tended for an hour in the evening. The lovebird babies needed feeding and cleaning at least four times a day. I did my chores by rote, considering them more a blessing than a burden. When Bonk wasn't nesting, she'd ride on my shoulder and chirp into my ear as I cleaned cages and fed her flock mates. There were avian details to memorize and consummate, too—how to pull a blood feather from a bird's wing in case of emergency; how to hold a bird around the neck rather than its body because birds breathe differently than humans; how to recognize the signs of avian illness; how to stop bleeding; and how to know if a change in attitude was hormonal, behavioral, or medical.

I spent hours memorizing the Latin names for the bird species I wanted, peeling through the pages of Joseph Forshaw's
Parrots of the World
, a huge illustrated book with images of every parrot in the known universe. The lovebird species sounded like poetry:
Agapornis roseicollis
,
Agapornis fischeri
,
Agapornis personata
. I'd lie in bed staring into the darkness and repeat those names over and over until sleep came. They felt like a safety blanket. My peers in college participated in activities that created opportunities to socialize with associates and colleagues later in life—tennis, skiing, sailing, chess. I played with birds.

*   *   *

“You need to find a man,” Dr. Zielezienski, my avian veterinarian, admonished every time I saw her, which was often as my flock grew. I knew I'd found a compatriot in birds when I met Dr. Z, an avian wizard, able to handle the most bronco of parrots. She had a wry sense of humor, the slightest Virginia twang, and a sweet, reassuring, respectful manner, even when she chastised me for being bird addicted.

“You're spending too much time with these birds,” she'd say as I waltzed into the office with a bird carrier in hand, a new bundle of feathers inside. “Do you have a life at all? Are you dating?”

Dr. Z had been recently married, and was newly evangelistic about the value of a social life. I'd assure her I was dating, but, in truth, I spent much of my time scribbling formulas for lovebird genetics using Punnett squares and obsessing about creating a variety of rare lovebird colors in my flock. Poppy encouraged me not to date—no surprise there after the Peter fiasco—saying I was too young to be attached to one man. Heeding that advice, I saved most of my energy for the birds.

If I could sleuth out the background colors, patterns, and dominant and recessive traits for lovebirds in my breeding program, I could predict what color babies they'd have, and manipulate those genes to attain colors I wanted to produce. From the obvious genetics of my parent birds—what they looked like on the outside, their dominant genes—I could predict some color mutations in my babies. But I didn't know the background of most of my birds, so I had to guess about the parents' genetics based on the colors they threw in each clutch of chicks. Lovebird genetics are complex, because they're not all about dominant and recessive genes; there are incomplete-dominant traits, sex-linked traits, and dark factors.

New colors and patterns—called mutations—appear every year, and become the color du jour that breeders want in their flocks. Birds with new colors cost upward of four to six hundred dollars—funds I didn't have. I produced genetic maps to create new mutations within my own flock. It could take me five generations to develop a color I wanted.

As my baby birds matured, I gave Poppy his choice of them, so his flock became nearly as large as mine, and he started breeding lovebirds, too. His birds—my babies—seemed healthier than my birds, bigger and shinier, happier. I didn't know what we were doing differently. He had a synchronous relationship with the birds that I didn't have yet.

Bonk and I spent long, lazy days with Poppy on his screened balcony watching his lovebirds eat, drink, and tend to their young in the salt air after he and Nona sold the house with the coop and moved to a fourth-floor condo in Sunny Isles, Miami Beach, our pigeons having long ago flown away. Nona would call us inside for a Greek feast: spiced meat and pine nuts folded into crunchy filo triangles, tangy homemade hummus, grape leaves stuffed with lamb and rice and seasoned with dill and lime juice. Nona had two of every kitchen gadget—blenders, choppers, butter melters—one in the kitchen and one under her bed.

*   *   *

Bird breeders were plentiful in my area. We shared information and traded birds to broaden the gene pool in our flocks. Having sought acceptance in a group for so long, I felt sheltered by these people, who wanted to teach me what they knew. When Dr. Z started a “flock file” for me at her office, encompassing all my birds, I knew I'd graduated from dabbler to pro. The whole enterprise felt important and exhilarating. Each egg represented a life that hadn't been there before I put the process in motion. It was an ego-driven venture, for sure, but I learned about life and love from those birds. Their world was like the human world on a smaller scale. The mothers defended their babies fiercely, and the fathers defended the mothers. Sometimes the mothers and fathers mauled the babies, or each other, and there was no way to tell in advance which couple would be doting and which would be deadly. They guarded toys jealously and had frequent infidelities in the large outside aviaries, but the gestures of bonding between pairs resembled love—protecting the other from interlopers, cuddling and preening, and offering gifts, such as a spinach leaf or a palm frond.

Always,
always
, the birds tried to escape their cages. They became ingenious at escaping. One little green male, Chicky, slipped his cage several times by lifting the cage's front door and squeezing out of the small space. Or, perhaps, he had his mate, Holly, hold the door up as he unfettered himself of his prison. Once at large in the bird room, he'd fly from cage to cage and release as many other birds as he could.

I'd walk into the bird room to find half the birds out of their cages and Chicky in the middle of it all, delighting in his mischief, hanging on to the edge of a cage, flapping and chirruping wildly. It took me weeks to determine that Chicky was the freewheeling custodian of the bird room—one day I snuck in to find him in the middle of a jailbreak.

Birds are optimists. When I locked my birds in their cages, they didn't resign themselves to captivity. They didn't fade into a depression so deep that the sky felt like a stranger. Even flightless birds know there's a place for them beyond the chicken wire. It's the birthright birds want more than food, more than love—to escape from the cage, to fly, to soar, to see the earth from the appropriate perspective—above.

 

Chapter 9

The fall I turned twenty, Nona had a small stroke and lost some movement on her left side. Poppy doted on her, cooking and cleaning, doing exercises with her following illustrations on a photocopy the hospital gave him with her discharge papers. She was mobile, but slower.

Several months later, on a Friday night, Poppy called and asked if I could come over and help him with Nona. I was about to leave the house to meet some friends at a party. Perhaps he could call someone else? I was over an hour away. My parents were out and I had no way of reaching them. There was desperation in his voice, but I didn't think whatever was happening could be that bad. If it were, wouldn't he call an ambulance?

At the party, I couldn't shake Poppy's voice. “
Chérie
,” he had said, “I cannot do this myself. I need to get Nona into the car.”

I found a pay phone near the restroom of the restaurant, but Poppy didn't answer, so I called my house, and my mom told me that Nona had been taken to Doctors Hospital in Coral Gables. I was confused about the distance, because there were many hospitals much closer, but that's where her primary physician was affiliated.

I teetered into the emergency room in high heels, short skirt, and sequined top, a mint in my mouth to cover the smell of beer, and found Poppy and my parents sitting in the waiting room, gray and anxious.

“Your grandmother had another stroke,” my dad said, the rims of his eyes red and wet.

Nona was parked on a gurney in the hallway next to the nurse's station, hooked to machines, clear tubing connected to her in strands, buoying her body on the bed, like she'd sink without them.

“Nona?” I said, peering into her face. I grasped her good hand.

“I never thought I would finish in a hospital,” she said in a gravelly voice, tears streaming toward her ears. She was seventy-two. Grandmothers live far longer.

“That's not what's going to happen,” I said. “You'll be fine. You'll see.” I couldn't understand why the doctors walked around and joked with one another as if no one there needed a miracle.

I stayed the night with her. We were in a low-ceilinged room by ourselves on the second floor, repetitive, disharmonic beeping emanating from every room and bouncing off the concrete hallways like racquetballs. A nurse brought me a reclining chair, but there was no rest. I sat up watching Nona, rubbing her paralyzed hand and foot as if I could shimmy life back into them, like trying to extract fire from a wet stick and a soft stone.

Early in the evening she could still move her fingers and toes a little. As the night progressed, she lost all use of her left arm and leg, and the left side of her face wilted.

I begged the nurses to call a doctor. At three in the morning I called my parents for help. Maybe the “adults” would have more luck conjuring a doctor. My parents came, asked for a doctor, and received the same reply. “She's having a stroke, this is what happens,” a nurse said. Researchers were developing thrombolytic drugs to dissolve clots in stroke victims' brains, but those drugs weren't available in 1990. All we could do was wait.

After a few days they moved Nona to the rehab facility in Baptist Hospital, the same hospital where I was born. Poppy would be unable to care for her until she regained the use of her arm and leg. The rehab had a fake supermarket with plastic produce in generous piles and empty boxes of macaroni and cheese arranged on an endcap, and mini shopping carts the patients pushed around as part of their physical therapy.

I overheard my dad telling my mom that a therapist said Nona wasn't going to improve. Weren't the therapists supposed to help her? I visited Nona every day after my classes and wheeled her around the hospital's lake in the sunshine, determined to heal her myself.

“Nicole,” she said, tapping her nose, “please tell them to take this out. I don't want this.” She had trouble swallowing, so they had pushed a tube down into her stomach through her nose and anchored it there with a large piece of white tape. I'm sure it was uncomfortable and embarrassing. This was a woman who never left the house without copious hairspray, cologne, and rouge on her cheeks. When I wheeled her back inside I asked the nurse if she could have the tube removed.

“That's how we're feeding her, sweetie,” the nurse said with a white grin. I thought of my baby birds and how I fed them.

“I'll feed her with a little spoon,” I said. “I'll help her, I promise.” The nurse smiled again, all teeth and sparkling eyes, and I had to tell Nona there was nothing they could do.

About a week later I drove to the hospital after school wearing a pair of plain white tennis shoes I had embellished with pink rhinestones and gold glitter glue, and topped off with shiny gold shoelaces that formed a giant bow at the top, like a birthday present. Nona would like them.

In the rehab area, my shoes cast rainbows on the walls as the florescent bulbs flashed on the facets of the rhinestones. I was in a good mood, happy to be done with the day and eager to see Nona.

I walked to Nona's room. Someone else was in her bed. I asked a nurse where they had moved her.

“Oh, honey, you'd better call home,” she said, rubbing my back, staring at the floor. “Those are some nice shoes.”

I called home from the nurse's station.

“Nicole, come home,” Poppy said. “Your grandmother is in surgery in a different part of the hospital.” I worried when Poppy didn't call me
Chérie
.

“Where? Tell me where she is.”

“Come home.” His voice trailed off as he handed the phone to my mother. She told me to drive carefully, her voice singsongy and tentative, like she was talking a jumper off a ledge.

“What happened to Nona?”

“Just come home. And drive slow, it's raining.”

I knew Nona was gone. She had finished her life in a hospital, as she had dreaded. The automatic hospital doors opened to the outside with a whoosh and the hot Miami air enveloped me like a sickness. I paused outside for a moment and looked around. The lake was a gray scab and the sodium lights cast buzzy orange reflections onto the growing puddles in the drizzle.

I bent down and untied my shiny gold shoelaces, took off my pink rhinestone studded shoes, walked to the trash can in front of the hospital doors, and tossed them into it.

I walked into the house wearing drenched, dirty socks, tracking mud puddles across the slate floor. The extended family—aunts, uncles, and cousins—had gathered in the living room. Blank faces swiveled toward me. I ran down the hall into my room, Poppy, my dad, and my mom trailing behind me. I slammed the door and locked it. Nona was the first person close to me to die, and I didn't know what came next.