Birds of America (3 page)

“Really?” said Sidra.

“I
think
it was flamingos. I’m not too expert with birds.”

“You’re
not
?” She was trying to tease him, but it came out wrong, like a lizard with a little hat on.

“To tell you the truth, I really don’t think I ever saw a single movie you were in.”

“Good.” She was drifting, indifferent, no longer paying attention.

He hitched his arm behind his head, wrist to nape. His chest heaved up and down. “I think I may of
heard
of you, though.”

Django Reinhardt was on the radio. She listened, carefully. “Astonishing sounds came from that man’s hands,” Sidra murmured.

Walter tried to kiss her, tried to get her attention back. He wasn’t that interested in music, though at times he tried to be. “ ‘Astonishing sounds’?” he said. “Like this?” He cupped his palms together, making little pops and suction noises.

“Yeah,” she murmured. But she was elsewhere, letting a dry wind sweep across the plain of her to sleep. “Like that.”

He began to realize, soon, that she did not respect him. A bug could sense it. A doorknob could figure it out. She never quite took him seriously. She would talk about films and film directors, then look at him and say, “Oh, never mind.” She was part of some other world. A world she no longer liked.

And now she was somewhere else. Another world she no longer liked.

But she was willing. Willing to give it a whirl. Once in a while, though she tried not to, she asked him about children, about having children, about turning kith to kin. How did he feel about all that? It seemed to her that if she were ever going to have a life of children and lawn mowers and grass clippings, it would be best to have it with someone who was not demeaned or trivialized by discussions of them. Did he like those big fertilized lawns? How about a nice rock garden? How did he feel deep down about those combination storm windows with the built-in screens?

“Yeah, I like them all right,” he said, and she would nod slyly and drink a little too much. She would try then not to think too strenuously about her
whole life
. She would try to live life one day at a time, like an alcoholic—drink, don’t drink, drink. Perhaps she should take drugs.

“I always thought someday I would have a little girl and name her after my grandmother.” Sidra sighed, peered wistfully into her sherry.

“What was your grandmother’s name?”

Sidra looked at his paisley mouth. “Grandma. Her name was Grandma.” Walter laughed in a honking sort of way. “Oh, thank you,” murmured Sidra. “Thank you for laughing.”

Walter had a subscription to
AutoWeek
. He flipped through
it in bed. He also liked to read repair manuals for new cars, particularly the Toyotas. He knew a lot about control panels, light-up panels, side panels.

“You’re so obviously wrong for each other,” said Charlotte over tapas at a tapas bar.

“Hey, please,” said Sidra. “I think my taste’s a little subtler than that.” The thing with tapas bars was that you just kept stuffing things into your mouth. “Obviously wrong is just the beginning. That’s where I
always
begin. At obviously wrong.” In theory, she liked the idea of mismatched couples, the wrangling and retangling, like a comedy by Shakespeare.

“I can’t imagine you with someone like him. He’s just not special.” Charlotte had met him only once. But she had heard of him from a girlfriend of hers. He had slept around, she’d said. “Into the pudding” is how she phrased it, and there were some boring stories. “Just don’t let him humiliate you. Don’t mistake a lack of sophistication for sweetness,” she added.

“I’m supposed to wait around for someone special, while every other girl in this town gets to have a life?”

“I don’t know, Sidra.”

It was true. Men could be with whomever they pleased. But women had to date better, kinder, richer, and bright, bright, bright, or else people got embarrassed. It suggested sexual things. “I’m a very average person,” she said desperately, somehow detecting that Charlotte already knew that, knew the deep, dark, wildly obvious secret of that, and how it made Sidra slightly pathetic, unseemly—
inferior
, when you got right down to it. Charlotte studied Sidra’s face, headlights caught in the stare of a deer. Guns don’t kill people, thought Sidra fizzily. Deer kill people.

“Maybe it’s that we all used to envy you so much,” Charlotte said a little bitterly. “You were so talented. You got all the lead parts in the plays. You were everyone’s dream of what
they
wanted.”

Sidra poked around at the appetizer in front of her, gardening it like a patch of land. She was unequal to anyone’s wistfulness. She had made too little of her life. Its loneliness shamed her like a crime. “Envy,” said Sidra. “That’s a lot like hate, isn’t it.” But Charlotte didn’t say anything. Probably she wanted Sidra to change the subject. Sidra stuffed her mouth full of feta cheese and onions, and looked up. “Well, all I can say is, I’m glad to be back.” A piece of feta dropped from her lips.

Charlotte looked down at it and smiled. “I know what you mean,” she said. She opened her mouth wide and let all the food inside fall out onto the table.

Charlotte could be funny like that. Sidra had forgotten that about her.

Walter had found some of her old movies in the video-rental place. She had a key. She went over one night and discovered him asleep in front of
Recluse with Roommate
. It was about a woman named Rose who rarely went out, because when she did, she was afraid of people. They seemed like alien life-forms—soulless, joyless, speaking asyntactically. Rose quickly became loosened from reality. Walter had it freeze-framed at the funny part, where Rose phones the psych ward to have them come take her away, but they refuse. She lay down next to him and tried to sleep, too, but began to cry a little. He stirred. “What’s wrong?” he asked.

“Nothing. You fell asleep. Watching me.”

“I was tired,” he said.

“I guess so.”

“Let me kiss you. Let me find your panels.” His eyes were closed. She could be anybody.

“Did you like the beginning part of the movie?” This need in her was new. Frightening. It made her hair curl. When had she ever needed so much?

“It was okay,” he said.

“So what is this guy, a race-car driver?” asked Tommy.

“No, he’s a mechanic.”

“Ugh! Quit him like a music lesson!”

“Like
a music lesson
? What is this,
Similes from the Middle Class
?
One Man’s Opinion
?” She was irritated.

“Sidra. This is not right! You need to go out with someone really smart for a change.”

“I’ve been out with smart. I’ve been out with someone who had two Ph.D.’s. We spent all of our time in bed with the light on, proofreading his vita.” She sighed. “Every little thing he’d ever done, every little, little, little. I mean, have you ever seen a vita?”

Tommy sighed, too. He had heard this story of Sidra’s before. “Yes,” he said. “I thought Patti LuPone was great.”

“Besides,” she said. “Who says he’s not smart?”

The Japanese cars were the most interesting. Though the Americans were getting sexier, trying to keep up with them.
Those Japs!

“Let’s talk about my world,” she said.

“What world?”

“Well, something
I
’m interested in. Something where there’s something in it for me.”

“Okay.” He turned and dimmed the lights, romantically. “Got a stock tip for you,” he said.

She was horrified, dispirited, interested.

He told her the name of a company somebody at work invested in. AutVis.

“What is it?”

“I don’t know. But some guy at work said buy this week. They’re going to make some announcement. If I had money, I’d buy.”

She bought, the very next morning. A thousand shares. By the afternoon, the stock had plummeted 10 percent; by the following morning, 50. She watched the ticker tape go by on the bottom of the TV news channel. She had become the major stockholder. The major stockholder of a dying company! Soon they were going to be calling her, wearily, to ask what she wanted done with the forklift.

“You’re a neater eater than I am,” Walter said to her over dinner at the Palmer House.

She looked at him darkly. “What the hell were you thinking of, recommending that stock?” she asked. “How could you be such an irresponsible idiot?” She saw it now, how their life would be together. She would yell; then he would yell. He would have an affair; then she would have an affair. And then they would be gone and gone, and they would live in that gone.

“I got the name wrong,” he said. “Sorry.”

“You what?”

“It wasn’t AutVis. It was AutDrive. I kept thinking it was vis for vision.”

“ ‘Vis for vision,’ ” she repeated.

“I’m not that good with names,” confessed Walter. “I do better with concepts.”

“ ‘Concepts,’ ” she repeated as well.

The concept of anger. The concept of bills. The concept of flightless, dodo love.

Outside, there was a watery gust from the direction of the lake. “Chicago,” said Walter. “The Windy City. Is this the Windy City or what?” He looked at her hopefully, which made her despise him more.

She shook her head. “I don’t even know why we’re together,” she said. “I mean, why are we even together?”

He looked at her hard. “I can’t answer that for you,” he yelled. He took two steps back, away from her. “You’ve got to
answer that for yourself!” And he hailed his own cab, got in, and rode away.

She walked back to the Days Inn alone. She played scales soundlessly, on the tops of the piano keys, her thin-jointed fingers lifting and falling quietly like the tines of a music box or the legs of a spider. When she tired, she turned on the television, moved through the channels, and discovered an old movie she’d been in, a love story–murder mystery called
Finishing Touches
. It was the kind of performance she had become, briefly, known for: a patched-together intimacy with the audience, half cartoon, half revelation; a cross between shyness and derision. She had not given a damn back then, sort of like now, only then it had been a style, a way of being, not a diagnosis or demise.

Perhaps she should have a baby.

In the morning, she went to visit her parents in Elmhurst. For winter, they had plastic-wrapped their home—the windows, the doors—so that it looked like a piece of avant-garde art. “Saves on heating bills,” they said.

They had taken to discussing her in front of her. “It was a movie, Don. It was a movie about adventure. Nudity can be art.”

“That’s not how I saw it! That’s not how I saw it at all!” said her father, red-faced, leaving the room. Naptime.

“How are you doing?” asked her mother, with what seemed like concern but was really an opening for something else. She had made tea.

“I’m okay, really,” said Sidra. Everything she said about herself now sounded like a lie. If she was bad, it sounded like a lie; if she was fine—also a lie.

Her mother fiddled with a spoon. “I was envious of you.” Her mother sighed. “I was always so envious of you! My own daughter!” She was shrieking it, saying it softly at first and then shrieking. It was exactly like Sidra’s childhood: just when she
thought life had become simple again, her mother gave her a new portion of the world to organize.

“I have to go,” said Sidra. She had only just gotten there, but she wanted to go. She didn’t want to visit her parents anymore. She didn’t want to look at their lives.

She went back to the Days Inn and phoned Tommy. She and Tommy understood each other. “I
get
you,” he used to say. His childhood had been full of sisters. He’d spent large portions of it drawing pictures of women in bathing suits—Miss Kenya from Nairobi!—and then asking one of the sisters to pick the most beautiful. If he disagreed, he asked another sister.

The connection was bad, and suddenly she felt too tired. “Darling, are you okay?” he said faintly.

“I’m okay.”

“I think I’m hard of hearing,” he said.

“I think I’m hard of talking,” she said. “I’ll phone you tomorrow.”

She phoned Walter instead. “I need to see you,” she said.

“Oh, really?” he said skeptically, and then added, with a sweetness he seemed to have plucked expertly from the air like a fly, “Is this a great country or what?”

She felt grateful to be with him again. “Let’s never be apart,” she whispered, rubbing his stomach. He had the physical inclinations of a dog: he liked stomach, ears, excited greetings.

“Fine by me,” he said.

“Tomorrow, let’s go out to dinner somewhere really expensive. My treat.”

“Uh,” said Walter, “tomorrow’s no good.”

“Oh.”

“How about Sunday?”

“What’s wrong with tomorrow?”

“I’ve got. Well, I’ve gotta work and I’ll be tired, first of all.”

“What’s second of all?”

“I’m getting together with this woman I know.”

“Oh?”

“It’s no big deal. It’s nothing. It’s not a date or anything.”

“Who is she?”

“Someone whose car I fixed. Loose mountings in the exhaust system. She wants to get together and talk about it some more. She wants to know about catalytic converters. You know, women are afraid of getting taken advantage of.”

“Really!”

“Yeah, well, so Sunday would be better.”

“Is she attractive?”

Walter scrinched up his face and made a sound of unenthusiasm. “Enh,” he said, and placed his hand laterally in the air, rotating it up and down a little.

Before he left in the morning, she said, “Just don’t sleep with her.”

“Sidra,”
he said, scolding her for lack of trust or for attempted supervision—she wasn’t sure which.

That night, he didn’t come home. She phoned and phoned and then drank a six-pack and fell asleep. In the morning, she phoned again. Finally, at eleven o’clock, he answered.

She hung up.

At 11:30, her phone rang. “Hi,” he said cheerfully. He was in a good mood.

“So where were you all night?” asked Sidra. This was what she had become. She felt shorter and squatter and badly coiffed.