Birds of America (8 page)

“Sure!” I say, not knowing that, in a rush, I will forget, and that I’ll be on the plane home already, leafing through some inane airline magazine, before I remember that I forgot to do it. “Look,” I say, finding a Kenny Loggins disc. It has the song he heard earlier, the one from the video. “Let’s play this.”

“Goody,” he says. “Mom! Dad! Come on!”

“All right, Eugenie-boy,” says Cal, coming in from the dining room. Simone is behind him.

“I’m Mercury, I’m Neptune, now I’m Pluto so far away,” says Eugene, dashing around the room, making up his own dance.

“They’re doing the planets in school,” says Simone.

“Yes,” says Eugene. “We’re doing the planets!”

“And which planet,” I ask him, “do you think is the most interesting?” Mars, with its canals? Saturn, with its rings?

Eugene stands still, looks at me thoughtfully, solemnly. “Earth, of course,” he says.

Cal laughs. “Well, that’s the right answer!”

“This is it!” sings Kenny Loggins. “This is it!” We make a phalanx and march, strut, slide to the music. We crouch, move backward, then burst forward again. We’re aiming to create the mildewy, resinous sweat smell of dance, the parsed, repeated movement. Cal and Simone are into it. They jiggle and link arms. “This is it!” In the middle of the song, Eugene suddenly sits down to rest on the sofa, watching the grown-ups. Like the best dancers and audiences in the world, he is determined not to cough until the end.

“Come here, honey,” I say, going to him. I am thinking not only of my own body here, that unbeguilable, broken basket, that stiff meringue. I am not, Patrick, thinking only of myself, my lost troupe, my empty bed. I am thinking of the dancing body’s magnificent and ostentatious scorn. This is how we offer ourselves, enter heaven, enter speaking: we say with motion, in space, This is what life’s done so far down here; this is all and what and everything it’s managed—this body, these bodies, that body—so what do you think, Heaven? What do you fucking think?

“Stand next to me,” I say, and Eugene does, looking up at me with his orange warrior face. We step in place: knees up, knees down. Knees up, knees down. Dip-glide-slide. Dip-glide-slide. “This is it!” “This is it!” Then we go wild and fling our limbs to the sky.

When Olena was a little girl, she had called them lie-berries—a fibbing fruit, a story store—and now she had a job in one. She had originally wanted to teach English literature, but when she failed to warm to the graduate study of it, its french-fried theories—a vocabulary of arson!—she’d transferred to library school, where everyone was taught to take care of books, tenderly, as if they were dishes or dolls.

She had learned to read at an early age. Her parents, newly settled in Vermont from Tirgu Mures in Transylvania, were anxious that their daughter learn to speak English, to blend in with the community in a way they felt they probably never would, and so every Saturday they took her to the children’s section of the Rutland library and let her spend time with the librarian, who chose books for her and sometimes even read a page or two out loud, though there was a sign that said
PLEASE BE QUIET BOYS AND GIRLS
. No comma.

Which made it seem to Olena that only the boys had to be quiet. She and the librarian could do whatever they wanted.

She had loved the librarian.

And when Olena’s Romanian began to recede altogether, and in its stead bloomed a slow, rich English-speaking voice, not unlike the librarian’s, too womanly for a little girl, the other children on her street became even more afraid of her.
“Dracula!”
they shouted.
“Transylvaniess!”
they shrieked, and ran.

“You’ll have a new name now,” her father told her the first day of first grade. He had already changed their last name from Todorescu to Resnick. His shop was called “Resnick’s Furs.” “From here on in, you will no longer be Olena. You will have a nice American name: Nell.”

“You make to say ze name,” her mother said. “When ze teacher tell you
Olena
, you say,
‘No, Nell.’
Say
Nell
.”

“Nell,” said Olena. But when she got to school, the teacher, sensing something dreamy and outcast in her, clasped her hand and exclaimed, “Olena! What a beautiful name!” Olena’s heart filled with gratitude and surprise, and she fell in close to the teacher’s hip, adoring and mute.

From there on in, only her parents, in their throaty Romanian accents, ever called her Nell, her secret, jaunty American self existing only for them.

“Nell, how are ze ozer children at ze school?”

“Nell, please to tell us what you do.”

Years later, when they were killed in a car crash on the Farm to Market Road, and the Nell-that-never-lived died with them, Olena, numbly rearranging the letters of her own name on the envelopes of the sympathy cards she received, discovered what the letters spelled:
Olena; Alone
. It was a body walled in the cellar of her, a whiff and forecast of doom like an early, rotten spring—and she longed for the Nell-that-never-lived’s return. She wished to start over again, to be someone living coltishly in the world, not someone hidden away, behind books, with a carefully learned voice and a sad past.

She missed her mother the most.

·  ·  ·

The library Olena worked in was one of the most prestigious university libraries in the Midwest. It housed a large collection of rare and foreign books, and she had driven across several states to get there, squinting through the splattered tempera of insects on the windshield, watching for the dark tail of a possible tornado, and getting sick, painfully, in Indiana, in the rest rooms of the dead-Hoosier service plazas along I-80. The ladies’ rooms there had had electric eyes for the toilets, the sinks, the hand dryers, and she’d set them all off by staggering in and out of the stalls or leaning into the sinks. “You the only one in here?” asked a cleaning woman. “You the only one in here making this racket?” Olena had smiled, a dog’s smile; in the yellowish light, everything seemed tragic and ridiculous and unable to stop. The flatness of the terrain gave her vertigo, she decided, that was it. The land was windswept; there were no smells. In Vermont, she had felt cradled by mountains. Now, here, she would have to be brave.

But she had no memory of how to be brave. Here, it seemed, she had no memories at all. Nothing triggered them. And once in a while, when she gave voice to the fleeting edge of one, it seemed like something she was making up.

She first met Nick at the library in May. She was temporarily positioned at the reference desk, hauled out from her ordinary task as supervisor of foreign cataloging, to replace someone who was ill. Nick was researching statistics on municipal campaign spending in the state. “Haven’t stepped into a library since I was eighteen,” he said. He looked at least forty.

She showed him where he might look. “Try looking here,” she said, writing down the names of indexes to state records, but he kept looking at
her
. “Or here.”

“I’m managing a county board seat campaign,” he said. “The election’s not until the fall, but I’m trying to get a jump on things.” His hair was a coppery brown, threaded through
with silver. There was something animated in his eyes, like pond life. “I just wanted to get some comparison figures. Will you have a cup of coffee with me?”

“I don’t think so,” she said.

But he came back the next day and asked her again.

The coffee shop near campus was hot and noisy, crowded with students, and Nick loudly ordered espresso for them both. She usually didn’t like espresso, its gritty, cigarish taste. But there was in the air that kind of distortion that bent you a little; it caused your usual self to grow slippery, to wander off and shop, to get blurry, bleed, bevel with possibility. She drank the espresso fast, with determination and a sense of adventure. “I guess I’ll have a second,” she said, and wiped her mouth with a napkin.

“I’ll get it,” said Nick, and when he came back, he told her some more about the campaign he was running. “It’s important to get the endorsements of the neighborhood associations,” he said. He ran a bratwurst and frozen yogurt stand called Please Squeeze and Bratwursts. He had gotten to know a lot of people that way. “I feel alive and relevant, living my life like this,” he said. “I don’t feel like I’ve sold out.”

“Sold out to what?” she asked.

He smiled. “I can tell you’re not from around here,” he said. He raked his hand through the various metals of his hair. “
Selling out
. Like doing something you really never wanted to do, and getting paid too much for it.”

“Oh,” she said.

“When I was a kid, my father said to me, ‘Sometimes in life, son, you’re going to find you have to do things you don’t want to do,’ and I looked him right in the eye and said, ‘No fucking way.’ ” Olena laughed. “I mean, you probably always wanted to be a librarian, right?”

She looked at all the crooked diagonals of his face and
couldn’t tell whether he was serious. “Me?” she said. “I first went to graduate school to be an English professor.” She sighed, switched elbows, sinking her chin into her other hand. “I did try,” she said. “I read Derrida. I read Lacan. I read
Reading Lacan
. I read ‘Reading
Reading Lacan’
—and that’s when I applied to library school.”

“I don’t know who Lacan is,” he said.

“He’s, well—you see? That’s why I like libraries: No whos or whys. Just ‘where is it?’ ”

“And
where
are you from?” he asked, his face briefly animated by his own clever change of subject. “Originally.” There was, it seemed, a way of spotting those not native to the town. It was a college town, attractive and dull, and it hurried the transients along—the students, gypsies, visiting scholars and comics—with a motion not unlike peristalsis.

“Vermont,” she said.

“Vermont!” Nick exclaimed, as if this were exotic, which made her glad she hadn’t said something like Transylvania. He leaned toward her, confidentially. “I have to tell you: I own one chair from Ethan Allen Furniture.”

“You do?” She smiled. “I won’t tell anyone.”

“Before that, however, I was in prison, and didn’t own a stick.”

“Really?” she asked. She sat back. Was he telling the truth? As a girl, she’d been very gullible, but she had always learned more that way.

“I went to school here,” he said. “In the sixties. I bombed a warehouse where the military was storing research supplies. I got twelve years.” He paused, searching her eyes to see how she was doing with this, how
he
was doing with it. Then he fetched back his gaze, like a piece of jewelry he’d merely wanted to show her, quick. “There wasn’t supposed to be anyone there; we’d checked it all out in advance. But this poor asshole named Lawrence Sperry—Larry Sperry! Christ, can you imagine having a name like that?”

“Sure,” said Olena.

Nick looked at her suspiciously. “He was in there, working late. He lost a leg and an eye in the explosion. I got the federal pen in Winford. Attempted murder.”

The thick coffee coated his lips. He had been looking steadily at her, but now he looked away.

“Would you like a bun?” asked Olena. “I’m going to go get a bun.” She stood, but he turned and gazed up at her with such disbelief that she sat back down again, sloppily, sidesaddle. She twisted forward, leaned into the table. “I’m sorry. Is that all true, what you just said? Did that really happen to you?”

“What?”
His mouth fell open. “You think I’d make that up?”

“It’s just that, well, I work around a lot of literature,” she said.

“ ‘Literature,’ ” he repeated.

She touched his hand. She didn’t know what else to do. “Can I cook dinner for you some night? Tonight?”

There was a blaze in his eye, a concentrated seeing. He seemed for a moment able to look right into her, know her in a way that was uncluttered by actually knowing her. He seemed to have no information or misinformation, only a kind of photography, factless but true.

“Yes,” he said, “you can.”

Which was how he came to spend the evening beneath the cheap stained-glass lamp of her dining room, its barroom red, its Schlitz-Tiffany light, and then to spend the night, and not leave.

Olena had never lived with a man before. “Except my father,” she said, and Nick studied her eyes, the streak of blankness in them, when she said it. Though she had dated two different boys in college, they were the kind who liked to leave early, to eat breakfast without her at smoky greasy spoons, to sit at the
counter with the large men in the blue windbreakers, read the paper, get their cups refilled.

She had never been with anyone who stayed. Anyone who’d moved in his box of tapes, his Ethan Allen chair.

Anyone who’d had lease problems at his old place.

“I’m trying to bring this thing together,” he said, holding her in the middle of the afternoon. “My life, the campaign, my thing with you: I’m trying to get all my birds to land in the same yard.” Out the window, there was an afternoon moon, like a golf ball, pocked and stuck. She looked at the calcified egg of it, its coin face, its blue neighborhood of nothing. Then she looked at him. There was the pond life again in his eyes, and in the rest of his face a hesitant, warm stillness.

“Do you like making love to me?” she asked, at night, during a thunderstorm.

“Of course. Why do you ask?”

“Are you satisfied with me?”

He turned toward her, kissed her. “Yes,” he said. “I don’t need a show.”

She was quiet for a long time. “People are giving shows?”

The rain and wind rushed down the gutters, snapped the branches of the weak trees in the side yard.

He had her inexperience and self-esteem in mind. At the movies, at the beginning, he whispered, “Twentieth Century–Fox. Baby, that’s you.” During a slapstick part, in a library where card catalogs were upended and scattered wildly through the air, she broke into a pale, cold sweat, and he moved toward her, hid her head in his chest, saying, “Don’t look, don’t look.” At the end, they would sit through the long credits—gaffer, best boy, key grip. “That’s what
we
need to get,” he said. “A grip.”