Megan Bergman - Birds of a Lesser Paradise - Stories

I’d found the Lemur Center position listed in the paper after moving to Virginia to be closer to Leslie. Calling All Animal Lovers, it said. Work with endangered lemurs, aye-ayes, and bush babies.

Who doesn’t love animals? I’d thought. Animals I could do. And I figured that when you worked with animals, especially endangered ones, the focus was on them, not you.

I’ve come to find that the people at the Lemur Center are good people. People who donate to food banks, adopt incontinent Australian shepherds with epilepsy, bake casseroles for sick coworkers. People whose husbands work jobs they love, rewilding toxic meadows for a paycheck that puts them just above the poverty line.

I figure sooner or later they’ll realize I’m not one of them, that I’m not good the way they are. I’m unreliable. I even surprise myself with the shitty things I’m capable of. The only time I took the high road was when I was pregnant with Leslie. I was sober and scared and for the first time I knew I was doing something that mattered.

My doctor had told me that my child was comforted by my voice, could hear everything I said. Your bones are conductors, he’d said. The mother’s voice rises above the carpet of sound in utero. When I sang it was often “Edelweiss,” sometimes “Rainy Night in Georgia,” things my father had sung to me.

My father also taught me to love movies. I loved National Velvet, he Cleopatra . My father said he liked to lose himself in film. He went to the cinema every weekend, alone if he had to, and was always happier afterward. He spoke about the heroines at the dinner table as if they were real, as if he’d like to have supper with them, give them advice, help them find a happy ending — save them from their heartless husbands or neighborhood racketeers. He’d been working on his own script since college; every few years he sent it off to an agent or studio, but nothing ever came of it. I think its failure to sell was his greatest disappointment.

I liked the starlets in old movies — their neatly nipped waists, thick lipstick, and cherry-pie sopranos. I liked the way they looked when they drank, their red nails on the crystal highball. In old movies, America was beautiful, women could still feign naïveté, men worked one job their entire lives, and everyone could carry a tune. Who didn’t want to live in an old movie?

I walk along a worn path to the Lemur Center. The greenway was built in the sixties, and in winter you can see the remains of purple plaster bears — stolen and deposited here by vandals who’d raided a closed Yogi’s Fried Chicken in the late seventies.

The icy snow has muted everything except the birds and my footsteps. The pines are crystallized. Tufts of snow blow from the trees into the sheets I’m carrying for the lemurs. I ball up the sheets as much as I can and hunch over to keep them dry.

Walking in the snow, I feel one part home and one part stranger, an exotic escapee. I’ve read that when separated from native flocks, birds often attempt to join others. There are flocks of red-crowned parrots in Southern California, yellow-chevroned parakeets in San Francisco. There are dogs nursing fawns down the road. Hell — I’ve seen polar bears in the Bronx Zoo, soot on their white coats.

I hum a Brook Benton tune. My song is my own off-key timbre in the woods, my call.

It occurs to me that sometimes we make homes where we do not belong.

I probably lost Leslie when she was thirteen. It was the year I embraced my alcoholism. My ex-husband, Ryan — Leslie’s father — had moved us to Winston-Salem for a job. I wanted to improve my tennis game, so I spent afternoons at the club. I began interviewing nannies; I wanted someone to be there for Leslie when she got home from school. I also started an outpatient rehab program and Alcoholics Anonymous meetings. Or I almost started.

Rehab was a condition for keeping my marriage together. You go, Ryan said, and I’ll stay.

He was optimistic. I was scared. Ryan was beautiful then. Think Paul Newman in The Young Philadelphians.

That first day I was nervous and I sat in my parked car, engine running, outside the Presbyterian church where the AA meetings were held. I was used to drinking when I was nervous, and part of me had already made a mental U-turn for the nearest bar. But I got out, and the first person I saw was a nanny I’d interviewed two days before. She didn’t have her teeth in. Her face was drawn, pallid, sad.

Hi, she said. Call me.

Depressed, I went back to the car, drove home, and drank a quarter of a fifth of gin in the bathroom. I hid the rest behind a stack of toilet paper. I’m not sad like that, I thought. That’s ugly sad.

How was it? Ryan asked that evening. He didn’t say what “it” was; Leslie sat between us at the dinner table. She’d put glitter in her hair and was singing a pop song.

Revealing, I said.

I’d microwaved French-cut green beans and baked chicken marinated in lemon. Leslie ate a roll and didn’t touch what was on her plate. Our television set was on in the living room: Bogie singing with Chinese orphans in The Left Hand of God .

I’m proud of you for going, Ryan said.

Two months more in Winston-Salem and Leslie had found me out. I’d stopped showing up for my tennis lessons at the club. One day she wrote down the tennis pro’s message and slipped it to me underneath the bathroom door.

Beneath his number she wrote: I love you. Please come out.

I saw the tips of her fingers as she pushed the note underneath the door. I wanted to touch them, but I wasn’t good enough for her. I worried something bad would rub off, that she’d adopt my insecurities and quirks as her own.

Mommy will get better, I said. I promise.

I could hear her listening, her face pressed to the door, her breath whistling through the crack. That soft, hot, anxious breath. She wasn’t fitting in at school after the move. Like me, she didn’t make friends easily. I wanted to hold her tightly, but I knew she’d smell the alcohol on my breath.

Mom’s sick, she told her father that night.

I should’ve told him the truth earlier. I could’ve told him how afraid I was of aging, how incompetent I felt as a mother. I could have gone to rehab. But if there’s one thing I’ve got, it’s a remarkable ability to throw up my hands and self-destruct. Ryan left with Leslie.

I don’t call the head of the Lemur Center when I get to the center’s gates. I can jump the fence, and I know the code to the aye-aye building. That’s the only place I want to go right now, a familiar place. The pressure is getting to me. I can’t look at the other lemur houses; some of these things are the last of their kind. They break my heart on an ordinary day — but today, when it feels postapocalyptic outside, when I’m here by myself — I know I’ll see them as they really are, alone. Finished. Hepburn in On Golden Pond .

Maybe I’ll call the center’s director in an hour, find out what she wants me to do. But right now I’m going to a place I know, so that I can stop being nervous and stop wanting a drink. I punch in my code on the keypad and enter the aye-aye house.

Faye Done Away is the resident Lemur Center aye-aye. Even though I’ve been working with her for a year, we have yet to reach an understanding. She still shirks from my hand when I clean her cage. Four years ago she was found in the back of a pet store after being imported illegally from Madagascar, and the center took her in. She’s the size of a raccoon, with blunt features, rounded ears, and a salt-and-pepper coat.

To me, she looks like the love child of a stray cat and an opossum. Her ears are huge. Her head is mostly bald. Her eyes are yellow and piercing. Her tail is a wild pipe cleaner, her fingers nimble and creepy.