Love Enough (11 page)

“Don’t open the window, the bird will fly out,” Bedri says. Ghost sputters out the thin smoke laughing. The bird z’ed and f’ed in the air of the back seat. It is loud even though Ghost doesn’t hear it, but Bedri does. It’s a small grey bird with a yellow triangular beak and blue feet.

It’s still afternoon outside the car, the time of afternoon when schools are just out and kids are bumbling around on
the pavements, running around each other with knapsacks on their backs. “Let’s go,” Bedri says, suddenly nostalgic with the scenes of shouting and running.

“Montreal?” Ghost asks.

“Yeah,” Bedri says, “But don’t open the window, the bird’ll get out.” Ghost is silent in case Bedri changes his mind. Then he says, “Wicked,” and turns the car toward an artery of the city leading out.

“A brother is like one’s shoulder,” Bedri says and leans his heavy head on Ghost’s shoulder. There is a momentary quiet. Even the bird went still. And the stillness is empty. Empty like something good. Like open time. Like if time opened an empty room. That’s what Ghost is thinking. He would like to sit in an empty room and he would like his body to be scarless and he would like his mind to be empty with maybe a lake in it, a cool huge lake, one with small waves, way up north and far away from the city. Wasaga Beach where he went one time with Nonna and Nonno and Lia. Mercede was there too, he remembers. He walked very far out and the lake was still only at his small waist. He looked around himself and there was only water.

Bedri’s heard this many times.
A brother is like one’s own shoulder
. His father says it. His father wanted him to be more like his cousin, Ghedi, Khat-eater. Obedient. If he
could he would, but he was never sure what his father meant by obedient. His father would make a series of grunts followed by a series of sayings that sounded like orders Bedri couldn’t understand or carry out. Ghost understands him better than his father. He lifts his head, the Audi passes under a bridge, he opens his mouth to repeat his father’s imprecations.
One cannot count on riches. A coward is full of precaution. He who does not shave you does not cut you
. They come to his head, his memory, but not to his mouth. His mouth remains open but quiet. The bird noise comes back. The bird wants to be let out, it flutters against the windows. He doesn’t want it to hurt its wings. He opens his window, it beats against his eyebrow and flies off. Another bridge goes over the car. It looks to him as if the bird flew under it.

It is difficult to leave the city at certain times. The traffic hurrying out from three to eight p.m. is terrible, but the Audi will do its best, it will do all it can to take them where they want to go—Montreal, wherever. It heads for the highway.

T
here are twenty-four house sparrows living on a small shelf on the right side of June’s house. In books, she has noticed these birds are mostly described as dun-coloured. She has watched them very closely. Small, quick birds, various declensions on brown and black and sand, flecks of red and even yellow, but if you were insensitive you would say dun. They are not ostentatious, these birds, but they have a nice sound. The new neighbours put up two bird feeders in their backyard and so, recklessly, according to June, increased the population of birds. Before that, there were nine house sparrows. She had made
do with a cherry tree and a blackberry patch and a back and forth battle with the birds about the fruit. That was how it should be. A balancing act, not, in her opinion, an infantilizing of nature. She remarked to the neighbours that they were creating a false economy in the backyard. What would happen when they went away in the summers? What, when they forgot to replenish the bird feeders? This dependency they were encouraging was typical of liberals, she told them, it was maudlin and superior. Even the birds sensed the neighbours’ insincerity, they did not nest in their walls but remained at June’s. But having calculated the food supply as abundant, their rate of pregnancy had increased.

Actually, she thought, human beings operated in the reverse, decreasing as their well-being increases. Oh well, so much for drawing parallels. But each previous summer, she would find a dead baby bird or two tossed out of the nest. The house sparrows did not seem to tolerate any but the sturdiest and most aggressive babies. So that parallel might be true for human beings in the city: children seemed to be larger each year, puffed out on growth chemicals in processed food, and more callous and superficial too.

Hiking boots, socks, batteries, vitamin B … June was making a mental list for the weekend camping in Algonquin Park, not something she liked to do, and did only because
of Sydney. The neighbours’ Jeep was idling in their garage at the back. June hated when they did that. Carbon monoxide. They were packing, she noticed, tent, chairs, canoe. She hoped they weren’t going to the same place as she and Sydney. Then it struck her, who would feed their birds? She flew out to the backyard and shouted across the fence, “So, who is going to feed your birds while you are away?”

“We …” They both said “we” at the same time. They hadn’t meant to answer her, let alone together. They were a couple and the man continued, “We left enough food.” June hates the couple—heteronormativity was engraved on their foreheads.

“They are not pets. This is exactly what I warned you about.”

“What?” the woman said.

“Eco-paternalism,” June said, “You’ve created this bullshit and now you’re stepping away as if they’re your pets and you’re leaving them with the neighbour. With me.”

“Look, June, give it a break,” the woman yelled and went on packing the back of their Jeep.

The neighbours did not return for the next three weeks. The forlorn birds hung about surveying the bird feeders. June refused to lift a finger hoping the neighbours would
never return so the world of the garden could find its balance again. But of course, she thought angrily, she now had to live with the knowledge of the situation all around her. The neighbours had upset the ecological balance and now famine would occur. They had changed the tastes of the sparrows, substituted some industrial chemical diet for the natural one, purely, on their whimsy. They fed the sparrows on whimsy.
Whimsy, whimsy, whimsy
, June repeated to herself. This for June was the worst kind of selfishness and superiority disguised as empathy.

June disliked starlings. They sought each day to displace the sparrows. She did not like their twitter or their sharp yellow predatory beaks. And she had no appreciation for their multi-coloured glistening feathers, at once green, blue, red, gold and black. She understood they lived in a communal nest that could take over an attic. This would otherwise be admirable to her as the phenomenology of socialism but she hated the aggression of starlings. If the neighbours decimated the sparrows with their goodwill and their fast-food bird feed, June knew the starlings would move in. One act always sets a whole array of acts in motion. In retrospect what begins innocently enough, without thought, compels a certain disaster.

A misanthrope, though she thought of herself in quite opposite terms. She found most people cruel despite their stated intentions; most people in the city thrashed about getting this and that without thinking of the consequences, she believed, even though most of them thought they were good people. Like starlings. More and more now, over this summer, the sound of sparrows would be replaced by the sound of starlings. This is in the summer of course. One thing the winter can be counted on for is stasis. Lovely stasis.

Sydney was June’s first lover without a cause. No political talk except June’s, no meetings except June’s, nor urgent phone calls except June’s.

Nothing like Beatriz all those years ago. Though there was never any question of Beatriz being permanent. Beatriz could not bear the English language, and her whole life was waiting for her in Estelí. But had there been a question, let us say there was a chance she might have stayed longer, it would have been nuclear between them. In the short months of Beatriz’s appearance in the city, only her life, with its secrets, mattered. She whispered gutturally into
telephones, she checked hidden notes, she made calculations and her whole body was like a bit of reddened coal. At the time June did not expect more than that; Beatriz was clearly passing through and this explosive impermanence was precisely what June wanted at the time. Not love but the fissive encounter, the intense ideas and intense sex and the hypersense that every moment was atomic and defining. Of course one cannot live at that pitch forever, though naturally one wants to.

Sydney was a breath of fresh air.
Something to be said for that cliché
, June said aloud. Sydney went to work in the mornings, did the minimum at a consumer retail clearing company, knowing reflexively, instinctively—whereas June only knew it analytically—that the working class was exploited and she should not do too much to increase the wealth of the corporate class. Sydney could not wait to get out of work, get back on Highway 400 and call June to start up their real life every evening. Life began for Sydney after five, and that meant dinner and movies and wine and dancing on Fridays and Saturdays, and sex without fail all day Sunday, and anytime in between, including just before work in the mornings. Especially before work in the mornings, because how else to pass the day talking on the phone trying to sell useless things to people who wanted to buy
useless things, like satellite radios, for listening to the useless radio playing, over and over again, useless songs. Sydney took the boredom of selling for granted.

June thought there was a rich vein of innocent ore running through Sydney’s mind. That’s what she called it, a rich vein of innocent ore. Meaning that there was a spontaneous space in Sydney that had not yet been dragged down by the world, neither June’s world nor the world at large. Sydney seemed always uplifted—albeit by gadgets and shoes and designer dark glasses and new cars and new watches. Not dogmatic like June. Every dinner together was therefore loaded with June’s sense of history, June’s theories on social economy. She deconstructed where the meat came from and where the asparagus. “So that’s why it tastes so good!” Sydney would mock, biting down on a breast of chicken. “Just be thankful, June.” June would be slightly chastened and shut up. Only slightly. She didn’t want to spoil Sydney. Spoil all that zeal for life. She had a feeling that she could. She was smarter, she thought, and so more brutal than Sydney. Like a starling.

Truly, June was afraid. What should be intensifying in her was waning. She had had no particular landing spot in mind yet the Women’s History Archive was not where she thought she would end up. Her reticence had settled her there. She
was afraid that all the grasp of the worldly, all the passion was leaving her. And so she was hanging on to Sydney for much more than she was willing to admit. Yes, she was more brutal. The kind of brutality that comes as it had come to her father, how to put it, with clarity. “I see the fucking world clearly, Sydney. You don’t. We are just hanging on a ball of hard mud spinning in space at a ridiculous speed. That’s us, that’s the earth. A ball of mud, hanging and hurtling nowhere.”

“Can I drink my wine in peace? Because if it’s like that then it doesn’t matter, and I should have a little more wine to enjoy the muddy ride.”

“It’s a muddy ride all right. Drink your wine and be unaware …”

“But if I’m aware, what good is it? You said yourself …”

“I just thought that meanwhile, while we are clinging to this ball of mud, the very least we could do is … is …”

June doesn’t want to change anyone, she doesn’t want to knock anyone off their axis. At least, not in relation to her. She wants Sydney to come to understand without her persuasion. Then again, June doesn’t know if she’s being coy or calculating or if she’s being principled. So anyway, silence is the best thing. This silence is the short path from free love to love. As soon as this silence comes between
them June begins to want more than she’s wanted. And since silence is so big, what she wants fills it to a far larger extent than she anticipates. If she’d said anything like, “Sydney, you are not giving me what I asked for and what you promised,” perhaps Sydney would have understood and straightened up. Sydney had no idea that the lapse, regarding the embraces, was so important. But June continued to say nothing and to let her resentment and disappointment fill an ever-expanding rift. Sydney remained chipper and cheery as ever, full of talk about people at the office, the people on the street; bringing bootleg videos, buying more shoes and gloves, more electronics. The house is filling up with crap as far as June is concerned but it is completely empty of what June wants—one embrace a day, one kindness a week. As long as Sydney’s there though, June thinks there’s that possibility down the road. But she could not help but grow slightly bitter at the fact that this is a small thing she’s asked, such a small thing. Sydney would never understand if June didn’t pay special attention to Sydney’s birthday, as a case in point. Birthdays were an elaborate event where “things” were acquired, soon to be discarded. June hated Sydney’s birthdays. Especially after the embraces, and kindnesses she herself asked for, were not given. But June doesn’t like to dwell because once an idea is in her
head it bounces and bounces like a pendulum and never goes away.