Megan Bergman: Birds of a Lesser Paradise: Stories

Mementos, I tell Ike. I close my eyes. Now I can hear my mother everywhere — in the kitchen, in my bedroom, on the front porch.

Turn off the television.

Warm up the stove.

Brush your hair.

Put your father’s shoes where I can’t see them. In the trash.

On Sunday, as promised, my Realtor arrives a half hour before the potential buyers and their home inspector.

Your house should look as perfect as possible, he’d said before I left for the weekend. Ask yourself: What would Jackie Onassis do?

When I see the Realtor’s convertible in the driveway, I ask Ike: Think you can box up the mini NASCARs and finger puppets?

Sorry I’m late, our Realtor says. He is a slightly overweight cosmopolitan type who wears ostrich-skin loafers and tonic in his hair.

He rushes to the kitchen, as if he has immediately sensed disorder. He strokes the valance over the kitchen window. I remembered last night, as I was hanging it, that Mom had found the pattern in Southern Living .

Is this velvet? he says. Are these. cobwebs?

I have placed scraps of rogue wallpaper next to my stove and another in the bathroom — a repeating pattern of pale brown cornucopias and faded fruit I took from my mother’s house.

These must come down, the Realtor says. Now.

He pinches the curling shreds with his thumb and forefinger.

Leave it, I say. They add charm.

You’ll never sell this house, he says, shaking his head in despair. Crickets on speed and a curtain that Elvis made in home economics class. Get serious.

Apple pie? I ask, pulling out a day-old pastry I had purchased from the market’s discount bread bin that morning. I’ve steeled myself against critique. There are too many things I can’t fix.

A couple in a minivan pulls up in front of the house, followed by the home inspector in a pickup truck. They come to the door, their faces already twisted with scrutiny. She is small and blond and he is thick like an old football player.

Hi, I say. Welcome. We’re about to head out; the house is all yours.

I stuff some magazines and soda into a canvas bag and look around for Ike. I hear him running up the basement steps.

Ike presents a scrap of siding that is covered in glue and cricket exoskeletons. It is not, I suspect, a winning move. Apparently, enough crickets survived the Realtor’s quick fix only to meet their end on our glue board. The couple exchange a glance. The inspector scribbles a note.

I crouch down to the floor and touch Ike’s cheek. You’re brave, I say. Thank you.

Ike grins. Together, we can make a solid grilled cheese, prune shrubs, clean house. Together, maybe we’re the housewife this house needs. Maybe we weren’t made for Connecticut’s long winters. Maybe our best life is here. On a good day, we’re just one man short of a catalog-worthy family.

A week before she left for the nursing home, we packed my mother’s belongings. Ike had just started kindergarten. Leaving him at a friend’s house to spend time with Mom on a Saturday was a miserable trade-off. I wanted to soak up every last bit of innocence he had left, answer every question, scoop him up for hugs when he’d allow it. But I was the only person Mom would allow in the house; there was no one else around to help.

I held up various tchotchkes for Mom’s approval.

Take or toss? I asked.

Mom sat in her recliner. She wore a light blue dress she’d made herself. The fabric was so worn it was nearly transparent. Carnie rested comfortably on her shoulder. I worried that his talons would break her thinning skin, but she moved as if she hardly noticed his weight.

I held up a box of ornaments, plastic apples I’d hand-painted for her as a child.

Toss ’em, she said.

I began to wrap her glassware in newspaper.

Make sure to leave plenty of print for lining Carnie’s cage, she said.

My mother cupped Carnie with both hands and brought him to her lap. She crossed her legs, then scratched the finger-wide point between Carnie’s wings. His eyes, like little black seeds, fell to half-mast as she stroked him. They were accustomed to each other, a pair of sad habits. He was more familiar with her voice and touch than I, more dear to her everyday existence. His transgressions — dirty cage, the occasional nip of her finger — were met with gentle understanding.

Don’t call here again, he said. Don’t call.

Remember, I told my mother. I’m not obligated to look after that bird.

Well, she said, I’m not obligated to look after you.

You are, I thought, her words a splinter in my chest. You have to be.

In that moment, I withered. I hated her for her coldness, her stubborn rationale, her ability to come up big in a fight even when she was dog-tired and bird-boned and couldn’t see the food on the end of her fork.

There she sat, outmoded in her homemade dress, bird in her lap, shit on her shoulder. Steamrolled by the world, but in the face of defeat she threatened us all.

Carnie moved back to her shoulder and buried his head into her thin hair, almost as if he was taking her in, making a memory. It occurred to me that with her voice inside of him he would always have more of her to remember.

You don’t want to keep these? I asked, giving her a second chance on a box of photographs.

My heart, she’d said. I can turn it off.

For years, I’d believed her.

But I know the truth now. What maniacs we are — sick with love, all of us.

First, he showed me his kidney.

This, Wood said, is the cranial pole. He pointed to the C-shaped edge of his organ.

My turn, I said.

He moved the ultrasound probe to my belly, rolling the small tip across my hardening stomach.

I think we cleaned this after the rottweiler, he said. He squinted at the probe.

We were in the veterinary clinic after hours, Wood still in his white coat, stethoscope around his neck. I was seated on a steel table, the metal cold against the backs of my knees. Wood had missed my last ob-gyn appointments and wanted to see the fetus for himself.

Don’t drop it, he said, handing me the probe while he dimmed the exam-room lights and warmed the transmission gel. This thing costs twenty thousand dollars.

I’d been lonely at my OB appointments, but Wood had an obligation to his patients. There were dogs with shattered elbows, cats with failing livers, cows with mastitis. Crying women in the waiting room cradling arthritic shih tzus, one-eyed ferrets. Malamutes with slipped discs, terriers with severe allergies to carpet cleaner. I believed they needed him more than I did.

He pressed the probe into my abdomen.

Here is the gestational sac, he said. And this flash here — this is the heart.

We were speechless then, watching the beginnings of our child thrive on-screen. Two freshly neutered Labradors whined from their cages outside.

Every week there was a patient at the clinic Wood forbade me from seeing, knowing I’d be unable to resist and would come in anyway, heart bleeding. Last week it had been a cancer-stricken golden-crowned sifaka who was the last of his kind in captivity. Despite the pain he must have been in, he had been gentle with his keeper, raising his bony arm so she could stroke his side. Her touch seemed to comfort him.

This week it was Cerulean, a tripod rottweiler.

Too hard on the heartstrings, Wood said.

Take me to see her, I said.

She’s not pretty, he said. She’s been self-mutilating. Down there . He raised his eyebrows.

Cerulean had come in that morning. Wood was an ultrasound specialist, and her owners had hoped he would be able to reveal a tumor or kidney stones — something specific that would explain why she was hurting herself.