Birds of a Lesser Paradise Read online

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  This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events or locales or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

  Copyright © 2012 by Megan Mayhew Bergman

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  First Scribner hardcover edition March 2012

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  Designed by Carla Jayne Jones

  Library of Congress Control Number: 2011019400

  ISBN 978-1-4516-4335-0

  ISBN 978-1-4516-4337-4 (ebook)

  Some of these stories have been published in slightly different form: “Housewifely Arts” in One Story and 2011 Best American Short Stories, “The Cow That Milked Herself” in New South and New Stories from the South 2010, “Another Story She Won’t Believe” in the Kenyon Review, “Saving Face” in the Southern Review, “Birds of a Lesser Paradise” in Narrative, “The Urban Coop” in the Greensboro Review, “The Right Company”: portions of this story appeared in Shenandoah and Oxford American, “Every Vein a Tooth” in Gulf Coast, “The Artificial Heart” in Oxford American, “The Two-Thousand-Dollar Sock” in Ploughshares.

  For Bo, Frasier, and Zephyr

  We will now discuss in a little more detail the Struggle for Existence.

  —Charles Darwin, On the Origin of Species

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  Contents

  Housewifely Arts

  The Cow That Milked Herself

  Birds of a Lesser Paradise

  Saving Face

  Yesterday’s Whales

  Another Story She Won’t Believe

  The Urban Coop

  The Right Company

  Night Hunting

  Every Vein a Tooth

  The Artificial Heart

  The Two-Thousand-Dollar Sock

  Acknowledgments

  Almost Famous Women Excerpt

  Reading Group Guide

  BIRDS

  of a

  LESSER

  PARADISE

  Housewifely Arts

  I am my own housewife, my own breadwinner. I make lunches and change lightbulbs. I kiss bruises and kill copperheads from the backyard creek with a steel hoe. I change sheets and the oil in my car. I can make a piecrust and exterminate humpback crickets in the crawl space with a homemade glue board, though not at the same time. I like to compliment myself on these things, because there’s no one else around to do it.

  Turn left, Ike says, in a falsetto British accent.

  There is no left—only a Carolina road that appears infinitely flat, surrounded by pines and the occasional car dealership billboard. I lost my mother last spring and am driving nine hours south on I-95 with a seven-year-old so that I might hear her voice again.

  Exit approaching, he says from the backseat. Bear right.

  Who are you today? I ask.

  The lady that lives in the GPS, Ike says. Mary Poppins.

  My son is a forty-three-pound drama queen, a mercurial shrimp of a boy who knows many of the words to Andrew Lloyd Webber’s oeuvre. He draws two eyes and a mouth on the fogged-up window.

  Baby, I say, don’t do that unless you have Windex in your backpack.

  Can you turn this song up? he says.

  I watch him in the rearview mirror. He vogues like Madonna in his booster seat. His white-blond shag swings with the bass.

  You should dress more like Gwen Stefani, he says.

  I picture myself in lamé hot pants and thigh-highs.

  Do you need to pee? I ask. We could stop for lunch.

  Ike sighs and pushes my old Wayfarers into his hair.

  Chicken nuggets? he asks.

  If I were a better mother, I would say no. If I were a better mother, there would be a cooler with a crustless PB and J in a Baggie, a plastic bin of carrot wedges and seedless grapes. If I were a better daughter, Ike would have known his grandmother, spent more time in her arms, wowed her with his impersonation of Christopher Plummer’s Captain von Trapp.

  How many eggs could a pterodactyl lay at one time? Ike asks.

  Probably no more than one, I say. One pterodactyl is enough for any mother.

  How much longer? Ike asks.

  Four hours, I say.

  Last night I didn’t sleep. Realizing it was Mom’s birthday, I tried to remember the way her clothes smelled, the freckles on her clavicle, her shoe size, the sound of her voice. When I couldn’t find those things in my memory, I decided to take Ike on a field trip.

  Four hours ’til what? he says.

  You’ll see, I say.

  I haven’t told Ike that we’re driving to a small roadside zoo outside of Myrtle Beach so that I can hear my mother’s voice call from the beak of a thirty-six-year-old African gray parrot, a bird I hated, a bird that could beep like a microwave, ring like a phone, and sneeze just like me.

  In moments of profound starvation, the exterminator told me, humpback crickets may devour their own legs, though they cannot regenerate limbs.

  Hell of a party trick, I said.

  My house has been for sale for a year and two months and a contract has finally come in, contingent on a home inspection. My firm has offered to transfer me to a paralegal supervisory position in Connecticut—a state where Ike has a better chance of escaping childhood obesity, God, and conservative political leanings. I can’t afford to leave until the house sells. My Realtor has tried scented candles, toile valances, and apple pies in the oven, but no smoke screen detracts from the cricket infestation.

  They jump, the Realtor said before I left town with Ike. Whenever I open the door to the basement, they hurl themselves at me. They’re like jumping spiders on steroids. Do something.

  Doesn’t everyone have this problem? I said. The exterminator already comes weekly, and I’ve installed sodium vapor bulbs.

  This is your chance, he said. If you clear out for the weekend, I can get a team in for a deep clean. We’ll vacuum them up, go for a quick fix.

  I thought about Mom, then, and her parrot. With a potential move farther north in the future, this might be my last opportunity to hear her voice.

  Okay, I said. I have a place in mind. A little road trip. Ike and I can clear out.

  I’ll see you Sunday, the Realtor said, walking to his compact convertible, his shirt crisp and tucked neatly into his pressed pants. I’ll come over for a walk-through before the inspection.

  That night, Ike and I covered scrap siding in glue and fly paper and scattered our torture devices throughout the basement, hoping to reduce the number of crickets.

  I hope you’re coming down later to get the bodies, Ike said. Because I’m not.

  He shivered and stuck out his tongue at the cricke
ts, which flung themselves from wall to ledge to ceiling.

  The cleaners will get rid of them, I said. If not, we’ll never sell this house.

  What if we live here forever? he asked.

  People used to do that, I said. Live in one house their entire lives. Your grandmother, for instance.

  I pictured her house, a two-bedroom white ranch with window boxes, brick chimney, and decorative screen door. The driveway was unpaved—an arc of sand, grass, and crushed oyster shells that led to a tin-covered carport. When I was growing up, there was no neighborhood—only adjoining farms and country lots with rambling cow pastures. People didn’t have fancy landscaping. Mom had tended her azaleas and boxwoods with halfhearted practicality, in case the chickens or sheep broke loose. The house was empty now, a tiny exoskeleton on a tree-cleared lot next to a Super Walmart.

  I pull into a rest stop, one of those suspicious gas station and fast-food combos. Ike kicks the back of the passenger seat. I scowl in the rearview.

  I need to stretch, he says. I have a cramp.

  Ike’s legs are the width of my wrist, hairless and pale. He is sweet and unassuming. He does not yet know he will be picked on for being undersized, for growing facial hair ten years too late.

  I want to wrap him in plastic and preserve him so that he can always be this way, this content. To my heart, Ike is still a neonate, a soft body I could gently fold and carry inside of me again.

  Ike and I lock the car and head into the gas station. A man with black hair curling across his neck and shoulders hustles into the restroom. He breathes hard, scratches his ear, and checks his phone. Next, a sickly looking man whose pants are too big shuffles by. He pauses to wipe his forehead with his sleeve. I think: These people are someone’s children.

  I clench Ike’s hand. I can feel his knuckles, the small bones beneath his flesh.

  Inside the restroom, the toilets hiss. I hold Ike by the shoulders; I do not want him to go in alone, but at seven, he’s ready for some independence.

  Garlic burst, he reads from a cellophane bag. Big flavor!

  I play with his cowlick. When Ike was born, he had a whorl of hair on the crown of his head like a small hurricane. He also had what the nurse called stork bites on the back of his neck and eyelids.

  The things my body has done to him, I think. Cancer genes, hay fever, high blood pressure, perhaps a fear of math—these are my gifts.

  I have to pee, he says.

  I release him, let him skip into the fluorescent, germ-infested cave, a room slick with mistakes and full of the type of men I hope he’ll never become.

  The first time I met my mother’s parrot, he was clinging to a wrought iron perch on the front porch. I was living in an apartment complex in a neighboring suburb, finishing up classes at the community college. After my father’s death, Mom and I had vowed to eat breakfast together weekly. That morning I was surprised to find a large gray bird joining us.

  The house was too quiet, Mom said. His owner gave me everything. I didn’t even have to buy the cages.

  You trust him not to fly away? I said.

  I guess I do, she said.

  When she first got him, Carnie could already imitate the sound of oncoming traffic, an ambulance siren, leaves rustling, the way Pete Sampras hit a tennis ball on TV. Soon, he could replicate my mother’s voice perfectly, her contralto imitations of Judy Garland and Reba McEntire, the way she answered the phone. What are you selling? I’m not interested.

  A month later, during breakfast, the bird moved from his perch to my shoulder without permission.

  Mom, I said. Get this damn bird off of me.

  Language! she warned. He’s a sponge. She brought her arm to my shoulder and Carnie stepped onto it. She scratched his neck lovingly.

  I was still grieving Dad, and it was strange to watch Mom find so much joy in this ebony-beaked wiseass.

  What are you selling? the bird said. I already have car insurance. Carnie spoke with perfect inflection, but he addressed his words to the air—a song, not conversation.

  You can’t take anything personally, Mom warned.

  The man of the house is not here, Carnie said. He’s dead. You really take it easy on those telemarketers, I said, looking at Mom.

  Dead, dead, dead, Carnie said.

  That night, he shredded the newspaper in his enclosure, which smelled like a stable. Lights out, Mom said, and tossed a threadbare beach towel over his cage. Carnie belted out the first verse of Patsy Cline’s “Walkin’ After Midnight,” then fell silent for the evening. His parlor tricks seemed cheap, and I hated the easy way he’d endeared himself to Mom.

  The next week, Carnie became violently protective of her. Wings clipped, he chased me on foot through the halls and hid behind doorframes, not realizing his beak stuck out beyond the molding. As I tried to shoo him from the kitchen counter, he savagely bit my wrist and fingers. Then, days later, as if exchanged for a new bird, Carnie lightened up and preened my hair while perched on the back of the couch.

  I’ll take him to the vet, Mom said, mildly apologetic for her bird’s bipolar antics. She was a perfectionist, and I knew she wanted a bird she could be proud of. But I think part of her was flattered by Carnie’s aggressive loyalty.

  Show me how you pet the bird, the vet, a behaviorist, had said.

  Carnie, inching left and right on Mom’s wrist, cocked his head to one side and shot us the eye. Like a whale, he gave us one side of his face at a time, revealing a tiny yellow iris, ensconced in a white mask the size of a thumbprint, one that looked out at the world with remarkable clarity.

  Mom ran her index finger down Carnie’s chest.

  I don’t know how to tell you this, the behaviorist said, but you’ve been sexually stimulating your parrot.

  Mom blushed.

  Inadvertently, the behaviorist said. Of course.

  He thinks I’m his mate? Mom asked.

  Less cuddling, the specialist said, more cage time.

  I called three places to find Carnie—the plumber who took him, the bird sanctuary he’d pawned the parrot off on, then the roadside zoo. Now the car is too warm and I’m falling asleep, but I don’t want to blast Ike with the AC. He’s playing card games on the console.

  Are we leaving so that people can move into our house? Ike asks.

  We’re going to Ted’s Roadside Zoo, I say.

  Go fish, Ike says. What’s at the zoo?

  There’s a bird I want to see, I say.

  What, he asks, is gin rummy?

  We pass a couple in a sedan. The woman is crying and flips down her visor.

  It’s hard being a single mom, but it’s easier than being a miserable wife. I hardly knew Ike’s father; he was what I’d call a five-night stand. We used to get coffee at the same place before work. The director of the local college theater, he was a notorious flirt, a married one. Separated, he’d claimed. He sends a little money each month, but doesn’t want to be involved. The upside to our arrangement is simplicity.

  I put some pressure on the gas and pass a school bus.

  Did I tell you about Louis’s mom? Ike says. How she got on the bus last week?

  Louis’s mom is a born-again Christian with two poodles and a coke habit, the kind of person I avoid at T-ball games and open houses at school.

  Tuesday afternoon, Ike says, she gets on the bus with her dogs, raises her fist, and says something like, Christ is risen! Indeed, He is risen.

  No, I say. Really?

  Ike pauses for a minute, as if he needs time to conjure the scene. Really, Ike says. Louis pretended not to know her when she got on, but his mom held on to that silver bar at the front of the bus and said, Lord, I’ve been places where people don’t put pepper on their eggs. Then she started to dance.

  Ike waves his arms in front of his face, fingers spread, imitating Louis’s strung-out mother. I see the rust-colored clouds of eczema on his forearms. I want to fix everything. I want him to know nothing but gentle landings. I don’t want him to know tha
t people like Louis’s mom exist, that people fall into land mines of pain and can’t crawl back out.

  When Ike was almost a year old, I brought him by for Mom to hold while I emptied the old milk from her fridge and scrubbed her toilets. I tried to come at least once a month to tidy the place and check in on Mom. The living room was beginning to smell; Mom was not cleaning up after Carnie. Suddenly the woman who’d ironed tablecloths, polished silver, bleached dinner napkins, and rotated mattresses had given up on housekeeping.

  Would you like to hold Ike while I clean? I said.

  Mom sat in a brown leather recliner, Carnie in his white lacquered cage a foot away from her—always within sight. Mom was losing weight and I worried she wasn’t eating well. I brought her cartons of cottage cheese and chicken salad, only to find them spoiled the following month.

  Are you trying to sell my house? she said. Are you giving Realtors my number? They’re calling with offers.

  There’s a shopping center going in next door, I said. This may be your chance to sell.

  I placed Ike in her arms.

  It’s not hard to lose the baby weight, Mom said, eyeing my waistline, if you try.

  I was determined not to fight back. There was heat between us, long-standing arguments we couldn’t remember but could still feel burning—should we sell Dad’s tools? Should she go to the eye doctor? Who would care for her goddamned bird? Didn’t I know how hard they’d worked to give me the right opportunities? Our disagreements were so sharp, so intense that we’d become afraid to engage with each other, and when we stopped fighting, we lost something.

  You’re like your father now, she said. You never get mad, even when you want to.

  It was true—Dad was hard to anger, even when I’d wasted fifteen thousand dollars of his hard-earned money on my freshman year of college at a private school they couldn’t afford. When I came home for the summer, he’d sat with his hands in his lap and a face that was more sad than disappointed. Mom stood behind him, silent and threatening. I knew later that night she’d berate him for taking it easy on me, and I hated her for it.