Blackbird House (18 page)

in a shed, meant for another world entirely

We were supposedly vegetarians, but Kalkin and I wolfed down hamburgers

and beef stew at our friend

Nancy Lanahan’s house whenever we were lucky enough to be invited to dinner.
 
The Lanahans’ place was a modest ranch half a mile down our street, but to us it was perfect.
 
There was a telephone, a television, two parents who worked, food in the refrigerator, what more could anyone ask for?
 
We would have moved into Nancy’s house if given half the chance.
 
We hated our farm, our parents, our lives.
 
We especially hated our sheep, Padma and Brownie, who were terribly stupid.
 
They ate my mother’s garden, got trapped in the nettle, were often stuck in the mud at the shore of the pond.
 
The sheep panicked whenever Kal and I crept up on them, bolting as though we were wolves rather than children.
 
It was somehow thrilling to chase those silly creatures through the meadow shouting Lamb chops!”
 
racing through the milkweed until we thought our hearts would burst and we felt flushed with a vague sense of embarrassment.
 
It wasn’t the lambs who were our enemies; why take it out on them?

One winter, when Kal was sixteen and I fifteen, he made a vow that he would move away to Los Angeles.
 
It was December, a clear, starry night, and we were walking home from Nancy’s house.
 
The snow crunched under our boots; the air was so salty and cold every breath we took hurt.
 
By then, Nancy was in love with my brother.
 
Although Nancy swore they had almost gone all the way while I was busy watching Dallas on the family’s TV and they were hidden beneath a quilt, Kal was not about to be tied down.
 
When he made his vow to leave home, I felt like crying.
 
I knew he would keep his promise.
 
He was like that, strong in the face of weakness, as reliable as he was unforgiving.
 
It was almost as though he were already gone when he was right there beside me, walking down the road, our collars turned up, our jeans so worn the wind cut right through the fabric.

Most of the kids in town knew that our father was growing marijuana in the field beyond our house, that he smoked it daily before he went out to meditate in the summer kitchen or down near the shoreline, where the tall reeds grew.
 
They thought it was funny, an old man still at it.
 
They thought we were lucky not to have rules and regulations, not even any expectations, it seemed.
 
Now we could hear our father chanting down at the pond.
 
I wished my parents knew I preferred those rich, snotty people on Dallas to them.
 
I ached to be living at South Fork right then and there, my hair dyed blond and poufed way out, diamond rings on every one of my fingers.

“Fucking idiot,” my brother said of Risha on that cold night.
 
“I cannot be genetically related to him.
 
I’m getting out of here, Maya.
 
If you’re smart, you will, too.”

My brother had inherited my father’s jawline, from the Adams-Cooper side of the family.
 
He was beautiful, but he didn’t know it, with golden hair that turned nearly white in the summers.
 
I had my mother’s curly dark hair, my father’s gray eyes, and nothing else that belonged to them.

Unlike most of the kids we knew, my brother and I didn’t smoke pot or get into trouble at school.
 
We disdained those who did.
 
My brother especially wanted to prove his heredity was a mistake; therefore, fun was out of the question.
 
Foolish actions unthinkable.
 
I was more cautious.
 
Why should I work hard when I wasn’t certain we would ever escape our parents’ legacy?
 
I let my brother be the guinea pig, waiting to see if he could right all that was wrong in our lives.
 
He worked at the gas station, sold Christmas trees culled from our property, and later on, when he was a senior in high school, started selling our father’s homegrown.
 
He earned enough of a profit to allow him to move to Los Angeles two weeks after high-school graduation.

Kal had probably earned more money by the age of eighteen than my father had in his entire lifetime, but he had bigger dreams.
 
He wasn’t about to stay in our little town, where the tides were the biggest topic of conversation down at the general store, and a storm was huge news to one and all.
 
Nancy tried her best to make my brother stay. She arrived on our doorstep on the night before he went away, weeping, hair in tangles, professing her love.
 
When Kal told her they were through, she cut her wrists in our driveway, but even that wasn’t enough to make Kalkin stay.
 
He calmly poured a pot of water on the spot, to wash the blood away, so the coyotes wouldn’t gather there at dusk.

“I must have done something wrong,” my mother said about Kal turning so hard.
 
He wouldn’t even let them drive him to the airport; he took the bus instead.

“Everyone has his own path,” my father said.
 
His hair was so long he had to braid it to keep it out of his eyes.
 
All at once, it had turned gray.
 
Risha wasn’t that much older than my friends’ parents, but he seemed ancient.

I laughed at my father’s vision of the world.
 
I really did.
 
For as long as I could remember, he had been planning a trip to India.
 
One of his old army buddies who had come for dinner said he’d been dreaming about this journey even back when they were enlisted men.
 
But so far, my father’s path had led only to the field behind our house.
 
As for my mother, it was too late for her to actualize her maternal instincts.
 
She had cried for days when her lamb Padma died, but when I had scarlet fever I had to walk down the road to Nancy’s and call the doctor myself.
 
If I’d left my fate in my mother’s hands I could have died, just to prove the point that medicine was overused.

“You’ve done quite a bit wrong,” I informed my mother.
 
“Try everything.”

She was selfish and silly, and now she wasn’t even pretty anymore.
 
She should have stayed Naomi Shapiro and led a normal life instead of weeping over lambs and watching her only son pack up and flee the moment he could.
 
She should have once suggested that I brush my hair.

Risha hardly seemed to notice Kalkin’s departure.
 
He was busy with another one of his projects that he never completed.
 
That summer when my brother left for Los Angeles, my father was involved in taking our kitchen apart.
 
He had milled some beautiful apple wood for the floors, and the house smelled like cider, a sad odor that got into our clothes and our hair.
 
No one used apple wood for a floor, it was among the most delicate of woods, sure to scratch and be damaged, but my father didn’t care about such matters.
 
Not Risha, the bull.
 
He’d set up a grill in the summer kitchen, that shack where Kal and I had been born, so my mother could cook out there.
 
We still had Brownie, the dark sheep, but Brownie was old and feeble and followed my mother around, crying when she wasn’t let into the house or the summer kitchen.
 
Brownie sounded like a human being sometimes; then I’d catch sight of her, standing like a stone in the farthest field, searching out my mother in the exact wrong direction, and my compassion would fade.
 
I had become stony myself now that my brother was gone.
 
It had always been two against two: The two of us normal, outraged, horrified.
 
The two of them burning Mumtaz incense, chanting late at night so that sometimes I’d wake from a sound sleep and imagine I was in a foreign country, one from which there was no escape.

My brother got a job with a movie producer, and that didn’t surprise

me.
 
Everyone wanted a piece of Kalkin.
 
He was so golden, so sure of

himself, a genetic wonder.
 
Nancy

Lanahan quickly gained twenty pounds pining for him.
 
She wrote strange verse on her skin with a ballpoint pen, and her parents became so distressed they took her up to Boston on Saturdays to see a psychiatrist.
 
Nancy had pretty much stopped talking to me.
 
For some reason she blamed me for not stopping my brother from fleeing Massachusetts, as if I could convince him of anything.
 
Our relationship didn’t work that way.
 
Kalkin did as he pleased, and I meekly followed.
 
Sometimes I stood with that stupid Brownie in the field and thought I probably felt the same way she did without Padma. A creature without direction, spooked by the wind in the milkweed, by the thud of apples as they fell from the trees.

Loneliness is a bad thing most times.
 
Worse when you’re seventeen.
 
It can become nasty and hopeless, and that’s what happened to me.
 
I stopped talking to my father, not that we’d ever had much to say.
 
I’d see him working on rebuilding the kitchen and I’d just know it would take a full year or more for him to finish.
 
I could feel my bitterness rising.
 
In the winter Naomi would still be traipsing out to the summer kitchen to start a fire in the grill.
 
The most ridiculous thing was, she wouldn’t even complain.
 
I wanted to shake my mother and say: Wake up!
 
This is the man you married, smoking pot out in the woods, making certain every plank in the kitchen floor is perfectly planed while the rest of the house falls down around us and Kalkin is three thousand miles away.
 
What have you done to yourself?
 
To us?
 
To our lives?

I kept thinking about the day my mother told me about, when they first found this house.
 
That day felt like a curse, like the cold hand of fate.
 
So I started to try and figure out who these people were, these strangers, my parents.
 
I took the train to New York, then went on to the Long Island Railroad in order to meet my mother’s older sister, Judith, at a Chinese restaurant in Great Neck.
 
My aunt looked like my mother, only reflected in a fun mirror at a carnival.
 
She was both like Naomi and completely different.
 
Whereas my mother cultivated her plainness, Judith was wearing diamonds and had on a chic black suit I coveted the minute I saw it.
 
Actually, she reminded me of Sue Ellen from Dallas, only not quite so sympathetic.

My aunt took one peek at me and was clearly disappointed.
 
I looked like I was from the sticks, I knew that.
 
A bedraggled long-lost niece.

I was no prize, I understood that much.
 
All the same, we had lunch,

and I prayed my aunt would pick up the check.
 
Judith told me about her

daughters, my cousins, one at Smith and the other at Brown.
 
Well,

la-di-da, I almost said, but I kept my mouth shut.
 
She told me about

her husband’s desire to move into Manhattan now that the girls were

gone, even though coops were so expensive.
 
I really didn’t care.
 
I

wanted to know about Naomi.
 
When I asked what had happened to my

mother, why was she so different, my aunt couldn’t tell me much. Judith

had been five years older and obviously self-absorbed; she’d never paid

much attention to little

Naomi, who was bookish and sweet, nobody’s problem.
 
Then that sweet little girl went and married that lunatic, and that was the end of her as far as the family was concerned.
 
Why she had done so was anyone’s guess.

“She always did have a bleeding heart,” my aunt informed me as I was leaving.
 
“That kind of thing can get you in trouble if you don’t watch out.”

I thought about that remark on the way home.
 
Naomi’s heart bled for my father, it was true; you could see that by the way she cared for him.
 
She drove fifty miles in order to buy the green tea he preferred.
 
She waited up for him and prided herself on never having gone to bed without him.
 
After I returned from New York, whenever I looked at Naomi, I saw her bleeding heart and I felt my coldness for my father in the pit of my stomach.
 
My bitterness was turning to poison.
 
My father had ruined all our lives for no particular reason.
 
Just vanity, nothing more.
 
We’d never had much to say to each other, now there was nothing.
 
We had no telephone, so when I wanted to call Kal I had to go over to Miss Brooks’ house next door and use the phone in her kitchen.
 
Miss Brooks worked at the library in town and was used to whispers; she was graceful enough to pretend not to hear me when I begged Kal to come home.
 
Sometimes when I did this I cried.
 
I could tell Kal was getting impatient with me.
 
He had his life in Los Angeles.
 
He had been promoted, gotten a larger apartment, after only six months.
 
There were women who would have done any thing for him; men who wished their own sons had as much drive and ambition as Kal.
 
It was his world, his dream, his reality, his life.