Megan Bergman: Birds of a Lesser Paradise: Stories

Iam my own housewife, my own breadwinner. I make lunches and change lightbulbs. I kiss bruises and kill copperheads from the backyard creek with a steel hoe. I change sheets and the oil in my car. I can make a piecrust and exterminate humpback crickets in the crawl space with a homemade glue board, though not at the same time. I like to compliment myself on these things, because there’s no one else around to do it.

Turn left, Ike says, in a falsetto British accent.

There is no left — only a Carolina road that appears infinitely flat, surrounded by pines and the occasional car dealership billboard. I lost my mother last spring and am driving nine hours south on I-95 with a seven-year-old so that I might hear her voice again.

Exit approaching, he says from the backseat. Bear right.

Who are you today? I ask.

The lady that lives in the GPS, Ike says. Mary Poppins.

My son is a forty-three-pound drama queen, a mercurial shrimp of a boy who knows many of the words to Andrew Lloyd Webber’s oeuvre. He draws two eyes and a mouth on the fogged-up window.

Baby, I say, don’t do that unless you have Windex in your backpack.

Can you turn this song up? he says.

I watch him in the rearview mirror. He vogues like Madonna in his booster seat. His white-blond shag swings with the bass.

You should dress more like Gwen Stefani, he says.

I picture myself in lamé hot pants and thigh-highs.

Do you need to pee? I ask. We could stop for lunch.

Ike sighs and pushes my old Wayfarers into his hair.

Chicken nuggets? he asks.

If I were a better mother, I would say no. If I were a better mother, there would be a cooler with a crustless PB and J in a Baggie, a plastic bin of carrot wedges and seedless grapes. If I were a better daughter, Ike would have known his grandmother, spent more time in her arms, wowed her with his impersonation of Christopher Plummer’s Captain von Trapp.

How many eggs could a pterodactyl lay at one time? Ike asks.

Probably no more than one, I say. One pterodactyl is enough for any mother.

How much longer? Ike asks.

Four hours, I say.

Last night I didn’t sleep. Realizing it was Mom’s birthday, I tried to remember the way her clothes smelled, the freckles on her clavicle, her shoe size, the sound of her voice. When I couldn’t find those things in my memory, I decided to take Ike on a field trip.

Four hours ’til what? he says.

You’ll see, I say.

I haven’t told Ike that we’re driving to a small roadside zoo outside of Myrtle Beach so that I can hear my mother’s voice call from the beak of a thirty-six-year-old African gray parrot, a bird I hated, a bird that could beep like a microwave, ring like a phone, and sneeze just like me.

In moments of profound starvation, the exterminator told me, humpback crickets may devour their own legs, though they cannot regenerate limbs.

Hell of a party trick, I said.

My house has been for sale for a year and two months and a contract has finally come in, contingent on a home inspection. My firm has offered to transfer me to a paralegal supervisory position in Connecticut — a state where Ike has a better chance of escaping childhood obesity, God, and conservative political leanings. I can’t afford to leave until the house sells. My Realtor has tried scented candles, toile valances, and apple pies in the oven, but no smoke screen detracts from the cricket infestation.

They jump, the Realtor said before I left town with Ike. Whenever I open the door to the basement, they hurl themselves at me. They’re like jumping spiders on steroids. Do something.

Doesn’t everyone have this problem? I said. The exterminator already comes weekly, and I’ve installed sodium vapor bulbs.

This is your chance, he said. If you clear out for the weekend, I can get a team in for a deep clean. We’ll vacuum them up, go for a quick fix.

I thought about Mom, then, and her parrot. With a potential move farther north in the future, this might be my last opportunity to hear her voice.

Okay, I said. I have a place in mind. A little road trip. Ike and I can clear out.

I’ll see you Sunday, the Realtor said, walking to his compact convertible, his shirt crisp and tucked neatly into his pressed pants. I’ll come over for a walk-through before the inspection.

That night, Ike and I covered scrap siding in glue and fly paper and scattered our torture devices throughout the basement, hoping to reduce the number of crickets.

I hope you’re coming down later to get the bodies, Ike said. Because I’m not.

He shivered and stuck out his tongue at the crickets, which flung themselves from wall to ledge to ceiling.

The cleaners will get rid of them, I said. If not, we’ll never sell this house.

What if we live here forever ? he asked.

People used to do that, I said. Live in one house their entire lives. Your grandmother, for instance.

I pictured her house, a two-bedroom white ranch with window boxes, brick chimney, and decorative screen door. The driveway was unpaved — an arc of sand, grass, and crushed oyster shells that led to a tin-covered carport. When I was growing up, there was no neighborhood — only adjoining farms and country lots with rambling cow pastures. People didn’t have fancy landscaping. Mom had tended her azaleas and boxwoods with halfhearted practicality, in case the chickens or sheep broke loose. The house was empty now, a tiny exoskeleton on a tree-cleared lot next to a Super Walmart.

I pull into a rest stop, one of those suspicious gas station and fast-food combos. Ike kicks the back of the passenger seat. I scowl in the rearview.

I need to stretch, he says. I have a cramp.

Ike’s legs are the width of my wrist, hairless and pale. He is sweet and unassuming. He does not yet know he will be picked on for being undersized, for growing facial hair ten years too late.

I want to wrap him in plastic and preserve him so that he can always be this way, this content. To my heart, Ike is still a neonate, a soft body I could gently fold and carry inside of me again.

Ike and I lock the car and head into the gas station. A man with black hair curling across his neck and shoulders hustles into the restroom. He breathes hard, scratches his ear, and checks his phone. Next, a sickly looking man whose pants are too big shuffles by. He pauses to wipe his forehead with his sleeve. I think: These people are someone’s children.

I clench Ike’s hand. I can feel his knuckles, the small bones beneath his flesh.

Inside the restroom, the toilets hiss. I hold Ike by the shoulders; I do not want him to go in alone, but at seven, he’s ready for some independence.

Garlic burst, he reads from a cellophane bag. Big flavor!

I play with his cowlick. When Ike was born, he had a whorl of hair on the crown of his head like a small hurricane. He also had what the nurse called stork bites on the back of his neck and eyelids.

The things my body has done to him, I think. Cancer genes, hay fever, high blood pressure, perhaps a fear of math — these are my gifts.

I have to pee, he says.

I release him, let him skip into the fluorescent, germ-infested cave, a room slick with mistakes and full of the type of men I hope he’ll never become.

The first time I met my mother’s parrot, he was clinging to a wrought iron perch on the front porch. I was living in an apartment complex in a neighboring suburb, finishing up classes at the community college. After my father’s death, Mom and I had vowed to eat breakfast together weekly. That morning I was surprised to find a large gray bird joining us.