The Lovebird (29 page)

Simon

Stunned, I lay on the bed in complete stillness for an hour. Simon had finally shown me what his gemlike eyes never had, the secret of his heart, the secret that had almost revealed itself and then slipped away from me on that final evening when I had walked down the hallway to deliver his dinner and found him sitting with his head in his hands. Simon, I now knew, shook for sadness. He shaded his eyes for shame. He was so lonely that he had compelled me to come close, and so afraid of being lonely in the future that he had pushed me away.

I felt myself returning back to him, and the quality of his presence was as vivid to me as if I had been beside him that very day. The hyacinths of his breath were all around, and the heat of his cushiony palms was on my waist. His voice with its many mysteries was in my ear. And all the life I had led after leaving his house blurred and paled like a fading old photograph. My time in the Middletown studio where the tears had run into my ears was the equivalent of a single moment. My maudlin meanderings in the Community Garden compressed tautly together into three economical images: white nightgown, chain-link fence, tendrils. Even my connection with Jack Dolce seemed diminished. And my month on the reservation took on the quality of a dream, one populated by turnip roots, knitted baby caps, a peach pit, printing press ink stains, tobacco seeds shining like stars, and a vertical line between two dark eyes. The big blooming roses
of Jim’s apron closed into tight buds and disappeared. With his letter, Simon had reasserted himself as the foremost figure in my mind. He was unparalleled in his power to overwhelm my consciousness.

Still, for all its length, I had a strange sense that there was something missing from Simon’s message, but I couldn’t tell just what. Something about it made me uneasy. And it wasn’t his confessed infidelity to his wife or her rage. I had forgiven him and pitied her as soon as I had read of both. It was something else.

I rolled onto my side and watched Daphne board her wheel in preparation for her all-night run. Cora tiptoed down the hallway, passing the door to her room slowly and glancing in with an expression of impatience. She looked as though she had passed that way, with that face, many times. “Oh, Cora,” I called. “It’s okay. You can come in.”

“I wasn’t sure. You looked so worried and, I don’t know, I wondered if maybe you got some bad news.”

“Oh, no. No, not bad. This is your room. I don’t want you to feel like you can’t come in anytime you want.” Cora undressed. She sighed with contentment when she slipped her nightgown over her head. Though I could not see her, she exuded a complete and cozy comfort at simply being in her habitat, at being tucked away safely for the night in the only home she had ever known, and I thought of what Granma had told me about the peace and pervasive quietness she had felt as a girl sleeping beside her grandmother under a buffalo blanket.

Could he help me, I wondered? Simon said he wanted to help me, if only by making me less alone. How did he mean? Did he mean for me to go back to his shadowy house with its white walls? My heart pounded at the memory of it.

I was tired, though it wasn’t very late. I heard Josie leave and my eyes fluttered shut and then opened again at the sound of Cora’s voice. “Want to turn off the light?” she asked.

“Okay,” I whispered.

She stood at the doorway again, slender and dark against the glow from the hallway, her long arms dangling, ready for the ceremony that took place every night. “I love you, Granma,” she called.

“I love you,” came the answer.

“I love you, Dad,” she added.

“I love you,” he replied. And, thus enveloped, she was asleep in minutes, and soon I was drawn into dreams of my own by her long and regular breaths.

8
TURTLE
(Chrysemys picta)

I DID NOT WANT TO ACCOMPANY
Granma, Cora, and Josie on a trip to Billings to buy supplies for Cora’s new Crow Fair leggings, which were to be part of her traditional dancing regalia. “Crow Fair is coming up,” Cora had informed all of us on numerous occasions. “I really need to make new leggins. My legs grew.”

“Well, I guess we’d better get over to the craft supply store then,” Josie had replied one day when she dropped off a pile of mail and a paper plate laden with a stack of her homemade fry bread.

Cora sucked in her breath. “When? When? When?” she wondered, executing a few steps of the Fancy Shawl Dance—her specialty—in the living room, and causing the pair of matching lamps stationed beside the recliners (bronze bucking broncos straddled by cowboys with yellowed shades for hats) to shake. Josie did not name a date.

One afternoon a few weeks later, however, Josie rolled up unexpectedly in her truck, left the engine running, and called to us through the driver’s-side window. “You all ready to go get some beads and whatnot for Cora’s Crow Fair clothes? Come on, let’s do this!”

“Yaaaaoow!” Cora let out an elated yelp, scooped up her portable stereo, and dove out the door. Granma clicked off the TV just before Charmaigne was about to break the big news to Victoria that they were half sisters. She tucked a ball of yarn into her shirtsleeve for the road. I looked up from
Wheelock’s
. I had been trying to translate a letter by Pliny the Younger about the “Delights of the Country.” So far, I had written, “Picture to yourself an immense amphitheater, such as only nature could create.”

“Well,” Granma purred. “Get your shoes, honey.”

“Oh, that’s okay.” I drummed my fingers on Pliny. “I’ll hang out here. You three go on—”

“Why don’t you want to come? This is important.”

“I know, but I—I don’t feel safe out there.”

“What are you going to do with yourself, Margie? Stay hidden in this house forever?”

“No.” I closed the book. I thought of Simon’s letter, as I had for the entire week since its arrival.
If I can help you, let me help you
. “I’m not going to stay forever.”

Granma raised one silver brow. “Where are you going to go?”

“Well, I … That’s something I’ve been thinking about. I … I’m considering …” But what had he meant? And would the covey of mourning doves still be there, calling to each other from under the eaves, if I returned? “When the time is right …” I fumbled. Granma studied me in silence.

“You can’t just stay cooped up in here all day,” she said. “It isn’t healthy.” Her words sparked a reverie during which I imagined myself falling into a state of frail health within that tiny abode, and exhibiting the strangely flattering signs of tuberculosis—wet and shining eyes, slightly opened mouth, twin apples ripening on my otherwise chalky cheeks. I saw myself lounging insensibly on Granma’s fully extended recliner, my damp curls spread extravagantly across a pillow. I saw Granma nursing me with mysterious tinctures made from roots and
prairie plants. I saw Belly cooling my fever with lavish licks and nuzzling my face with consoling whimpers. And I saw Simon as a slouchy, cowboy-hatted silhouette in the doorway, with a rectangle of sunsetty orange behind him. “Oh my,” he uttered under his breath, and then he stepped closer to lean over me, anoint my forehead with a kiss, and say, “I’m sorry I led you into this mess, Precious.”

And just when I imagined him scooping me up and laying my languid body over his white horse (Annette waited beside it on a small strawberry roan of her own), Josie gave her horn an impatient honk. Cora cried out to us, but her thin little voice was swallowed by the engine’s roar.

“Honey,” Granma said, “today I think you should come to the city. It will be good for you. Now, come on. I want your company.”

ON THE DRIVE TO BILLINGS
, Cora crowned herself with her headphones and bobbed her head to the beat of whatever played through her portable stereo. She didn’t seem bothered at all by the sonic competition coming from the truck radio, which Josie had turned up to top volume. Only when I studied the rhythm of her head’s movement (back and forth, back and forth, in the manner of the nervous turkeys the Operation crew and I had stealthily liberated from their crowded cages at a filthy farm one late November night) did I realize she and Josie were tuned to the very same station.

We stopped for gas on the reservation. Josie stepped out to pump, but a rangy fortyish fellow who had pulled up just behind us hopped hurriedly out of his own rusty rig and beat her to it. He was, Cora told me in a laughing whisper, Pete Sings Plenty, who, she added, had been hankering after Josie’s body for years. “Shh, shh, Grandchild,” Granma said before turning her face away to hide her grin.

Pete Sings Plenty wore an exceedingly wispy mustache that blew weakly in the Bighorn breeze. He held the pump in Josie’s tank and eyed her with longing while the gas gurgled in. When he waved goodbye to us as we drove away, Josie asked no one in particular, “What is the point of growing that mustache?” She watched him in the rearview mirror and slurped greedily from the giant slushie Pete had bought for her at the mini-mart. “Indians don’t have the facial hair for that sort of thing. Doesn’t he realize?”

I SPIED THREE COP CARS
within five minutes of our arrival in Billings. Josie, I noticed, thought using her turn signal and stopping at bright red hexagonal signs were optional facets of the driving experience, their execution dependent on how cooperative she was feeling at any given moment, and when I politely asked her to please drive carefully to avoid being pulled over, she blinded me with a big smile, stained orange from her slushie, called “What?!” and turned the radio down one fraction of a notch. Granma knitted obliviously, and Cora knocked her sharp knees together over and over in bead-anticipation.

The city was a shock after the weeks I had spent immersed in what Pliny would have called the delights of the country. There were so many cars, buildings, fast-food restaurants, parking lots—all the same sort of sprawl that characterized my Orange County home. (There, Dad was driving his Skylark from one open house to another and waiting, I worried, for a letter I’d promised but still had yet to send.) But I knew none of the secret charms that lay beneath Billings’s unbeautiful surface. The streets were noisy, and the sun’s brightness seemed harsher and sharper-edged—glaring cruelly off the windows of the downtown buildings—than it did on the prairie. To my surprise, I missed the reservation, and not just because I was uneasy about being seen.

Even my first glimpse of new faces in over a month left me disappointed and vaguely sad. On one street, a jowly man in a business suit walked fast while he jabbered into a cell phone and devoured a hamburger before disappearing behind the behemoth doors of a bank. On another, a woman Granma’s age pitifully pushed a shopping cart full of aluminum cans and grimaced against the cutting sunlight, as if smiling at some secret thought or person no one else could see. “It’s so
crowded
here,” Cora said.

We passed a shoe repair shop, a sporting goods store, a place called Whole Woman that sold plus-sized dresses, and an old movie theater that had been converted into a church of indeterminate denomination. The marquee that had once flashed the glamorous names of great silver-screen beauties now read:
FEELING THE HEAT? THIS CHURCH IS PRAYER-CONDITIONED
.

The sky was the same one that extended endlessly over the reservation, but it looked paler somehow, its cerulean more diffuse. Even the green leaves of the trees lining the sidewalks had a washed-out, overexposed quality. When I pulled down my sunglasses to see whether the bleached effect remained, another cop car pulled up alongside us at a red light. I slumped down, shielding the side of my face with my hand.

“You have that weird look again,” Cora said.

“What look?”

“The one you had the first night you came to our house. The one you get whenever my dad talks to you. Like you don’t know whether to smile, cry, or maybe run away. Why do you get so nervous, Margie? Geez.”

“Cora,” Granma said.

THE CRAFT SUPPLY STORE WAS
in a new strip mall on a treeless avenue. Inside, I followed Josie, Cora, and Granma to an aisle lined with clear plastic canisters of seed beads in every imaginable
hue—as if all the colors missing from the city had been captured and condensed into the tiniest of spheres.