The Lovebird (27 page)

“Wait, Margie,” Jim said. “Don’t you want to see?”

“Oh, y-yes.” I watched his hands disappear into the bag. First, he pulled out a shiny red teakettle.

“For you, Mom,” he said.

“Oooh, honey, it’s so pretty. Thank you.”

“And this, too.” He unveiled an old wooden pencil box with a sliding lid painted like an American flag. Granma pushed the lid back to discover a collection of metal knitting needles in pastel pink and purple and aqua. She gasped with delight.

“Hmmm …” Jim said. “And what’s in here for Cora?” He squinted into the bag, dipped his head all the way inside of it, and sighed out a sleepy-sounding “Let’s see …” until feisty Cora darted at him and tried to snatch the sack away.

“Dad!” she shrieked.

Jim emerged with a pair of headphones on his head and a portable stereo resting in his hand. “It plays CDs, too,” he said. “Should work great—just needs batteries.” Cora had some difficulty arranging the headphones just so over the frames of her glasses. Once she got them in place, she kept them on, listening to nothing but imagined music and the muffled sounds of our voices. She bobbed her head back and forth in a rhythmic, funky way.

“Sister,” Jim said, and regal Josie sat up even straighter in
expectation. “I’m glad you’re here tonight because I found something for you, too.”

Josie’s gift was a carved bangle bracelet made of dark, grainy wood. It suited her splendidly. She slipped it onto her wrist, rested her head in her hand as if to model it, and batted her eyelashes. “Jim” was all she said.

“And for Fern, who is so sweet … I have …” Jim reached into the bag, and I wondered if he really did have something for Fern, because her presence was unexpected, but he came through. “… 
this
!” He held up a stuffed koala, which Fern passionately embraced before pushing her chubby fingers into its pouch. There was a quarter inside.

“And, last but not least,” Jim mumbled and fumbled for a cumbersome something at the very bottom of the bag. “For Margie.”

I leaned with precarious composure against the wall. “You didn’t have to get me anything—”

“I know.” He let out an abrupt laugh. Granma, Josie, Cora, and Fern all stared at the bag in silence and waited with burning eyes, curious to see what Jim had selected for me, and when he lifted out a cookbook, each looked disappointed in her own way: Granma silently shook her head, Josie recoiled backward as if she smelled an offensive odor, Cora stopped shimmying for a moment and yawned, and Fern stage-whispered “Oh, no” into the ear of her koala.

Jim passed me the book. I noticed his hand shook slightly.
Three Hundred Thrifty Thirty-Minute Meals!
the cover shouted. I flashed back to my months in Simon Mellinkoff’s kitchen, the many nights I’d spent fussing over meticulously prepared meat-free fare because Simon required the most ascetic concoctions. And now, was I supposed to cook for a household of unrepentant omnivores when I was still (with the exception of occasional fresh eggs) holding fast to my vegan diet? How long, I wondered once
more, recalling what Bumble had said about the duration of my stay, was “a while”? I struggled to cork a sudden fantasy that Agents Fox and Jones would discover my whereabouts after all and liberate me from what might turn out to be several months of sweaty stove-based servitude.

But I could not hurt Jim’s feelings. “Wow, this is wonderful.” I flipped through the pages. “Thank you, Jim. Mmm, it all looks delicious. And,” I rambled, “I have been thinking I should do more to earn my keep around here, so this is perfect. I’ll start cooking—”

“Actually,” he interrupted, “that’s not exactly what I had in mind.” He looked askance, as usual, and went on with the same shake in his voice that I’d seen in his hands. “I was thinking that maybe a couple of nights a week—well, on the weekends—you and I could whip something up together.”

Evidently, he had, with that statement, redeemed himself in the eyes of our onlookers, because Granma uttered an enamored “Oh!” Josie shook her head back and forth slowly, as if she had just watched her favorite basketball player make an impossible shot, and Cora was impressed enough to let her mouth fall open. “Good idea, James,” said the plainspoken Fern.

“I thought we could liven up the menu around here,” he continued, “and also give Mom a break. So, maybe you could pick some good recipes and then tell me what ingredients we need on Friday mornings, and I’ll swing by the supermarket in Billings on my way home from work. Of course, we can make a vegan version of everything. We can cook up some good meals, you and I, together. On Saturday and Sunday nights.” He cleared his throat. “For everyone.”

I looked into the kitchen. I considered the diminutive two-burner stove, the single sink, the stubby countertop. I pictured Jim and me stuffed in there, side by side, smilingly stirring spaghetti. Was there a teaspoon—a pinch, even—of genuine, not
obligatory, friendliness simmering somewhere in his proposal? The long garland of braided roots undulating against the wall seemed to express a definite yes, but when I looked at the wet blue towels drooping from the rusty nails above the sink, I wasn’t sure.

“Gosh.” I smiled dumbly down at the book and saw that his hands had left some orange, yellow, and green fingerprints on the cover. I opened it randomly to Marinated Chicken Breast on a Bed of Aromatic Rice. “Thanks, Jim,” I said. “That sounds like a good idea.” But he had already turned away to ask Cora to take off her headphones.

“Cora. The moon’s coming up and it’s full,” he said.

She stopped gyrating. “It is?”

“Yes. I watched it my whole drive home.”

“You know what that means, Fern,” Cora said. “It’s a night for jumping.”

Fern laid down her koala and hurried outside.

“What is she doing?” I asked.

“They don’t do it in California?” said Josie with a teasing squint.

“Do what?”

“She’s just jumping at the moon,” Granma said.

“It’s something we do, we Crows, when we are young,” added Jim.

“Kids know they’ll grow up good and strong if they jump when
bilítaachiia
is rising,” Josie explained, no longer teasing but serious.

“Where do they jump?”

“You know. Just up. Should we let her see?” Josie asked.

“Of course,” Jim said hastily. “Of course she can see. Come on.”

Outside, the air was hot. A lone lark, seduced by the moon into nightsinging, sang a stop-and-go song. The moon was high, but not yet as high as it would be. It was still rising, as if hung
on a transparent cord and lifted heavenward by the stealthiest of hands. Beneath the bird’s aria we heard a recurring thud, the sound of feet falling on dirt.

We saw them in the distance. Cora, too big for jumping, stood still, her body slender and dark against the blue prairie. She watched Fern leap again and again toward the white light. When the child rose, the moonglow reflected off her outstretched arms, her splayed little legs. When she landed, it shone off the top of her head. She looked like a star, one that was bound to the prairie and belonged there somehow, as if a star could flourish anywhere at all.

THE NEXT MORNING, I WOKE BEFORE DAWN
after a dream I couldn’t remember, but it was one that made me throb. I worried I may have even made a sound—a moan or a murmur—and disturbed Cora who slept so lightly, but her breathing was peaceful and regular, punctuated by occasional chirps from the previous night’s lark, still singing outside. My neck was stiff because, apparently, I’d been using my pillow as something to cling to rather than lie upon, and my legs were twined tightly around it. I was damp everywhere, from the pads of my bare toes to the place where my forehead met my hair. My throat was parched and my lips were chapped. I lay still and concentrated, and tried to follow one fine thread of the dream back to its spool of origin, but I couldn’t. The thread only shivered a few more times with some electric desire and dissolved. The lark called and waited for an answer that didn’t come.

I had not pressed my damp skin against anybody else’s for so long—not since I had left Simon’s house. Had the dream, I wondered, been about Simon, who had milled me, who had made me his own in a musty office where the light snuck in
through the slits in the shut blinds? Simon, who had plump earlobes and plump palms, whose dear girl I had been? It might have been about him, but there were no vestiges of jasmine in my nose, no hint of the hyacinths with which he had bathed my face on so many nights before he tended his wife’s wild garden and told me he was tired. A lot had happened since then, all of which I had chronicled in my long letter to him, and I wondered if he had read it yet.

I heard the soft squeak of the screen door open and close. I rolled onto my belly carefully, soundlessly, and bent my head to spy out the window. I saw that the star quilt Granma kept on her bed was wrapped around her shoulders and her feet were bare, and I wondered if there was dampness on the grass the way there was on me. I watched her walk out to a low hillock where she stood, unmoving, to pray.

Sometimes her head was tipped upward, sometimes down. Sometimes she looked in one direction, sometimes another. She was too distant and the light was too dim for me to discern the words her mouth might have been shaping. Even so, my gaze felt like an invasion and I moved my face away from the window. I lay on my back and stared at the ceiling above me.

At Holy Rosary back home, the ceiling was an enormous concave circle, representative of the sky, painted the same shade of blue as Mary’s cloak the way it was rendered in so many paintings of her—Virgin Mary blue, I always called it. I used to tilt my head back to look at it when Father Murphy prompted the parishioners to pray and everyone else bowed their heads. I used to look up at the ceiling and know that the actual sky, the one that arched over us all out of doors, was also the cloak of Mary. Yes, the sky was her cloak, the orange blossoms her crown of stars, the swaying forests her eyelashes, the Sierra Nevada mountain range her spine, the sand at the beach the skin on her elbows, the magnolia blossoms on the tree in our front yard the whites
of her eyes, and the September Santa Ana winds her sighs. She wasn’t just the mother of God, I thought—she was the mother of all creation.

Once in CCD a sister asked, “Where are your thoughts and your hearts during Mass, children? In what direction do they turn?”

I believed she meant the question to be rhetorical, but still I raised my hand and volunteered an answer, explaining the many earthly manifestations of Mary I pondered when I looked up at the skylike ceiling of the church.

“That sounds pagan, Marjorie,” the sister said. “Stop thinking so much about nature and how things smell. The mother of our Lord is not
sand
at the
beach
.” But my ideas, unorthodox though they might have been, remained in place. And even though I never attended Mass after I left home for college, I still had those Mary thoughts, and when I saw laboratory mice or undernourished birds or frightened chinchillas, I always (unbeknownst to Simon or the crew) said silent prayers to Mary, because I knew she must be the mother of all animals, and that was why I never stopped wearing the Mary medal Dad had given me to commemorate my first communion, and why even during my visits to Jack Dolce in Little Italy I often walked at sunset down the block to Saint Anthony’s Church (where the same gray-haired matrons who had come to our party knelt in their black dresses) and paused at the Mary statue to leave a few oyster shells at her feet (for oysters, I thought, were the muscles of her heart, and she was the sea, too, because in Latin, I’d learned from Simon, the sea is
mare
). Jack Dolce always shook his head at me. “She’s not real, Margie,” he said. “She’s an image.
Made up
.”

I contemplated all of this at dark face time while Granma stood outside in prayer. Then, as I always did, I fell back asleep before she returned to the house.

• • •

CORA AND I SAT ACROSS FROM EACH OTHER
at the table and ate bowls of cereal in sleepy silence. Beside her, Cora had placed her peach pit, which she had refused to relinquish to Granma.

At night, Cora stored the peach pit in a jewelry box on her dresser. Once opened, the box displayed a mechanical ballerina who pirouetted to a tinkling tune. Cora always spent a few meditative minutes examining the pit before bed. When she was through, she placed it in her jewelry box and lowered the lid with secretive swiftness. I wondered if the ballerina kept on pirouetting after the lid was closed, and if she and Daphne’s exercise wheel and my dreams and Cora’s would spin together according to some mysterious nocturnal choreography while all else in the world was still.

Now, I noticed, the pit was slightly worn down on one side, and after breakfast I discovered why. Cora stepped out onto the porch and blinked in the bright morning sun. She removed her spectacles and polished them with the hem of her nightgown. Then she sat on the ground, picked up the brick that Granma used to hold the screen door open when she craved a breeze, placed it before her, and set about rubbing the pit against the brick’s rough surface.

“What are you doing with the peach pit?” I asked.

“Making a ring.”

“A ring? To wear on your finger?” Cora nodded. “How?”

She sucked in a big breath, and I knew it was a subject of significance to her. “You rub away one side and then the other until you see the seed on the inside of the pit. Then you pull out the little seed that’s in there. Then you shape the inside, sort of, and …” Cora’s voice faltered. “I’m not sure yet what you do after that, but I’ll figure it out when I get there. My mom told me about it a long time ago.”

“Oh?” Cora had never spoken to me about her mother.

“She said
her
mom taught
her
how to do it. They came from Georgia, where the peaches grow.”

“Really?”

Cora was silent. Had there been a jewelry box with a ballerina twirling inside of it right there on the porch, she—I was sure—would have tucked the topic of her mother inside it and closed the lid tight. I decided to change the subject.