In the Land of Birdfishes (18 page)

I had to walk all the way around him to find her, slumped over the bar, a little unspooled, on the other side. At The Pit each night, I’d try to get her to drink with me but she almost never had more than one. She said she was afraid of embarrassing herself. One night Angie’d had to help her home, and she could hardly look at Angie the next day for the shame of it. But Melvin was a boozer and everyone in town knew it, and though it was still the afternoon, I could tell he’d managed to pour a couple drinks in her. I could count how many she’d had from just one look at her.

“Jason!” she said, pitching herself off the bar and out of her seat. I had to slow down to let her calm herself and sit back down. For a second, she looked like she thought we were going to hug, like I was her girlfriend or something.

“Well, let’s get you a drink,” said Melvin. “Did your aunt tell you we’re celebrating?”

What I hated most about him was that accent. It sounded like he was making fun of himself, which he couldn’t be doing, because no man in a suit jacket ever made fun of himself. So he was making fun of me or Aileen or whoever was listening. Talking slow like he was stupid, when he must have thought
we were stupid, believing that phony redneck accent coming out of a big fat man that went to some fancy school in the States. Talking slow like we had all the time in the world to listen to him. Even when I let my eyes rest on his and didn’t say anything, he didn’t look bothered.

“I’ll get you a pint,” he said. “Two pints—or should I make it three?” he asked Aileen.

“Just two,” she said, shaking her head a little too hard. “No more for me. Too many for me.”

I was thinking about what Angel had said and how I could figure out if it was true. If she had called that man.

“Nothing for me,” I said. “It’s lunchtime,” I said, eyeing the two of them. She should be embarrassed. Middle-aged lady, loose-faced this early in the day with some fat guy at some bar.

Her face showed she heard me, but I couldn’t understand her expression as she stared up at me. I wished her face were an answer.

While Melvin called to the bartender, she patted the stool beside her, a little unsteadily. “Sit down, Jason,” she said, her voice unsure. I wished her face were a sentence. I wished her face were a sentence that said if she’d called him or why she’d gone to that pay phone to do it and what she had said and what it would come to mean.

Melvin didn’t show how many glasses he’d had, though his face was pink and beads of sweat kept appearing on his forehead, which he seized with a cloth from his pocket—it was the only gesture he made that didn’t have a weird, ladylike feel about it. I wondered if he was a queer. I wondered what women or men ever saw the big, naked fact of him.

“So, Jason,” he said. “I was just toasting your aunt. She’s
got some darn interesting ideas, and a good head on her shoulders. She’s going to make a great reporter.”

On the stool beside Melvin, Aileen was still watching me with the same mystery of a look on her face. She seemed to be waiting for something, to want something from me.

“Jason,” Melvin said, lifting his glass into the air, “your aunt”—and if he said it like that one more time, he was going to lose a tooth—”is my newest hire. I’m making her associate editor. That’s a full-time, year-round job.”

She was grinning at me. “Jason, I told you I was going to stay.”

It didn’t mean anything. I thought of all the things it didn’t mean. So she’d stay in my house, it would be our house. Or I would help her find a place. An apartment, or maybe she’d buy a house of her own. So it was true what she’d said and she wouldn’t leave. And it didn’t matter who she’d called or hadn’t called. September would come and all those other tourists would be gone, and she wouldn’t leave.

The two of them looked at me with grins on their faces, but Aileen wasn’t sure and hers slipped a little as I said nothing.

“So this is a celebration, Jason,” Melvin said, and his smile had too many teeth in it. “Just a special little get-together in your aunt’s honour. A remarkable lady.” He swept his glass up into the air and tipped it at Aileen. “To this remarkable lady,” he said. “My dear, welcome to the
Light
.”

And then he turned to me. “Oh but you don’t have a drink, Jason. Let me get you one, so we can toast your aunt.” He waved at the bartender, but I shook my head and twisted my stool around to lean my back against the bar.

“I didn’t tell you,” Aileen said, whispering as if no one but me could hear, “that he would be here because I was afraid
you wouldn’t come. I wanted you to come. I wanted you to hear him say it.”

And she had a need in her that didn’t need her mouth to tell it. She had a need in her and it wasn’t Melvin or Stephan who could answer it. She needed me to say it was okay, okay that she had the job, okay that it was this joke of a man who would make it possible for her to stay, okay that she was going to leave behind everything she hadn’t brought with her in the suitcase I’d carried to my house. And so I said it was okay, and she put her whole self in my arms.

Over her shoulder, Melvin raised his eyebrows at me and nodded at her empty glass. But it was not because of the booze that she had her arms that tight around me or anything else he understood.

Her voice was a whisper in my ear. “I’m glad I came, Jason,” she said.

I’d held drunker girls before, girls who fell like this into me, their bones somehow gone soft and loose enough for them to be more blanket than girl, girls who whispered in that same wet way in my ear and wanted me to take their clothes off. But nobody wanted anything from me like she did. She wanted me to take her whole self and say that was okay too. She wanted all of me to be a family for her. She once told me that she came here to ask my mother to forgive her. And now that Ma was gone it was only me that could.

I poured what I could of her onto her stool again. Melvin put one of his big fat hands on her shoulder to hold her still and safe, and I knew the way he looked at her as he did that he would let her work at that paper as long as she wanted. He was her boss and wide as a door and maybe a queer to boot, but for a second I thought maybe I didn’t mind him so much after all.

I told the bartender to get a beer for me, and when it came, I raised it up to her, and she gave me a big, loose smile. And as I swigged it back, I thought probably I’d forgiven her the first day she was here. Because she’d come that far to find me. And then because she stayed.

Mara

T
HE OCCASION OF OUR
first meeting was Marla’s wedding. I liked that phrase. An actress in a film Agnes’s mother had once taken us to said it like that. In a voice that sounded like she owned everything, she’d said, “How well I remember the occasion of our first meeting.” It was a glamorous, dignified thing to say, so different from anything the nuns or anyone who visited the school would ever say. Agnes and I took to saying it to each other, and soon the other girls did too. We were pretending to be something that didn’t yet seem impossible. Only the older girls then had begun to suspect that no such occasion might ever occur, and that there might never be any meeting of anyone at all.

I never went to Marla’s wedding, which was to a boy from her hometown who worked at a pork farm and was said to be not all there but very kind. But the nuns gave Marla permission to invite three girls on our floor to go to town to celebrate with her the night before, escorted by Marla’s older sister. At dinner a week before the wedding, Father McGivney informed me that I was one of the girls Marla had chosen.

We so rarely were allowed to leave the school that we looked forward to the evening all week. We planned what
we would wear, and one or two of the nuns even, reluctantly, helped us find our nicest dresses from our scant wardrobes. Just before breakfast on the day of our outing, Sister Margaret knocked on my door and put something soft and silky in my hands. “I thought you might like to borrow my scarf to wear this evening,” she whispered. “My mother left it to me, and it’s a pity it never gets worn.” She hesitated. “You don’t know this, but you look very beautiful in green.”

Marla’s sister came to pick us up before we’d even eaten dinner, because she told us she would buy us dinner in town. I knew from the way the other girls discussed in whispers in the back seat what sort of restaurant we might be taken to that I was not the only one who had never been to one before. The car smelled of leather and smoke, and Marla told us proudly that it was pink and had a top that could go down in the summer. We all wished desperately that Marla had not chosen February for her wedding.

The place Marla’s sister took us was not a restaurant but a café. Music played so loudly in the background that I could hardly hear the man who came to ask us what we would have. “Can’t they turn the music down?” I hissed to Marla, but Marla’s sister laughed and said it was not a record but a real band playing right there. I was embarrassed that she had heard me, and pretended to know the name of the band when she told me. Marla’s sister went to art school in Toronto and was studying to be a sculptor. I felt overwhelmed by my luck at having taken the seat beside her. She spoke very gently to me, and often touched my shoulder warmly when she teased me, to let me know she wasn’t being cruel. But she was quick to grow restless or bored, and sometimes I would find when I answered one of her questions that she had already turned to talk to someone else.

She ordered root beers for all of us and then read from the menu. “Well, what would you each like?” she asked when she had finished. None of us said a word, and she laughed, and when the man came to ask what we wanted, she told him we all were having hamburger platters.

By the time our food came, the band had stopped playing and so I could hear everything everyone said at the table, even the boy Marla’s sister had invited to join us, who then took all her attention away from the rest of us.

“How are the eats?” Marla’s sister asked triumphantly after we’d had a few bites.

“Better than anything,” one of the girls said. “There’s nothing like this at school.”

“Like heaven,” agreed another.

Mine was already cold and so greasy it soaked my hands and mouth. After each bite, I had to draw my napkin across my lips and fingers, and soon it was steeped in oil and useless. I tugged Marla’s sleeve and asked if I could borrow hers, but she said no and sounded annoyed.

The boy told us a story about New York City and a musician he’d met there. He pretended he was telling the story to all of us, but I knew it was only Marla’s sister the story was for. She pretended not to know that and started digging in her bag when he got to the funniest part. “You got a light?” she asked.

When we all had finished, she announced, “Well.” I had to turn my face away from her, toward Marla, to keep from coughing at the smoke that circled me from her cigarette. “What do you say we get something a little stronger than root beer. This is a celebration after all. My little sister’s hen party. Why don’t we blow this Popsicle stand and find somewhere we can get a real drink?”

“I know a pub just around the block,” the boy said, too eagerly, and then tried to recover. “My buddy’s a bartender there. He won’t have a problem serving a few minors if I tell him they’re with me.”

“Sounds like a plan, man.” Beside me, she pushed herself out of her seat and I heard her cigarette hiss into extinction in her glass. “Come on, kiddos.”

Marla’s sister said it was too close to drive, though I was more excited about riding in her car again than I was about going anywhere else, so we held hands as if we were already back at school, and followed Marla and the boy to the pub.

The moment we were inside, I wished Marla had asked Agnes or any of the other girls instead of me. I’d never heard so many voices or so much noise all in one room. I suddenly thought the band at the café had not been so loud after all, and at least it had only been one noise, and a person could make sense of one noise, but not of all these different ones, all happening at once.

Marla’s sister ordered a glass of something for each of us, and mine was sweet and strong and I was surprised by how much I liked it. I drank it down because I did not know what else to do with it, and then Marla’s sister laughed at me and said, “Wait for the toast, greedy!” She rubbed her hand lightly in my hair and ordered me another one. “A little slower this time, please, little lush.”

Then she said how proud and happy she was for her sister and made what was called a toast. And then people banged their glasses together, even mine, and after that I was allowed to drink again, and I drank this one even faster than the first.

After that the noise became something impenetrable, and I felt it push and pull me around the room as I tried to find my way to Marla or her sister or a chair. Suddenly I stumbled, the music and voices tugging me down, down toward the floor, and then I was in someone’s arms, strong ones that plucked me out of the noise and dropped me into a chair.

“Well, well,” said a man’s voice. “For such a little thing, you sure are heavy on your feet.”

I started crying then and didn’t know why. The man got so close then I could smell cigarettes on him and something else, something salty and strong—maybe his drink or his skin itself. The smell was comforting, almost animal. It was the opposite of clean, but it wasn’t dirty. He smelled like something teeming, full, rich, deep. “Where did they go?” I asked the man.

“Those friends of yours? I think they stepped outside. Gone to smoke a little hash with Joe, I think.”

That made the tears fall faster and I was astonished with pity for myself. I rarely cried, and it seemed something very sad must have happened to me to cost so many tears.

“Don’t you worry, I can go find them for you,” said the man. He put his hand around mine and everything stilled. The room was, for a moment, perfectly silent as my hand disappeared inside his.

“Your hands are like Da’s,” I whispered.

“You want me to go find your friends?” he asked.

I shook my head.

“You want me to stay here?”

I nodded, tears stopped.

“You can’t see, can you,” he said, sounding sorry.

I shook my head again. It was so nice and easy just to say
nothing, though every time I moved my head I felt dizzy again. It was so kind of him to speak so I could be silent.

“What a pity. Pretty girl like you. What a tragedy. Were you always like this?”

Once more, I shook my head. Then, softly, shyly, I told him, “I still remember things. What my mother looked like. I had a sister. She looked just like me. It was a long time ago, but I still see those things, and that’s not like being blind, is it. I can still see those things.”

He squeezed my hand tighter in his. “No, that’s something, I guess. That’s something for sure.”

“Will you—” I was so bold it amazed me. I wished Marla’s sister could see how bold and adult I was. “Will you get me another one of those drinks?” I asked.

I heard him stand up, and he let go of my hand slowly. “I’ll be right back,” he said. He took a few steps away and then I heard him approach again. “Now, don’t you scamper away,” he told me before he headed back to the bar.

When he came back, he had a drink for both of us, and the one he gave me was stronger and more bitter than the last, but I liked it too. “How old are you anyway?” he asked me, and I told him I was eighteen. “Me too,” he said, and we both knew that both of us were lying. But we didn’t care, and he took me outside when we’d finished our drinks and couldn’t see Marla’s sister or the other girls there, and he thought maybe they went behind the alleyway, but when we got there, he said there was nobody there either. And then he told me how cold I looked, and he put his arm around me and said his truck was back there if I wanted to come in and warm up. And then when we were inside, he put the radio on, and I heard some woman singing about being alone, but I wasn’t alone, I was with this
man, who after a while turned down the radio and touched my cheek and put the heater on, rubbing his hands before it till they were warm and then he put them under my shirt, and I helped him take it off. The scarf that Sister Margaret said would make me look pretty got caught in my hair, but we took that off too, and then he had his lips on mine, and then, like I had made him crazy, made him an animal instead of a man, who would do anything, he put his tongue in my mouth, and it tasted like the drinks we’d had, and then he asked me, “Do you want me to take you back inside now?” and I couldn’t say no, couldn’t say anything, thought nothing except
How weak is thine heart
, but I shook my head and he understood and then he pulled me onto him like I weighed nothing at all.

“What is your name?” I asked when it was over, and he told me, “Jason.”