Noy Holland - Bird

Glory days? Birdthinks. Ridiculous .

She is lucky to be alive.

The morning going. The baby hungry and still in her bloated diaper. What in the world did they make those things with, with their insides like plumped tapioca, to endure the next 400 years?

Endure, Bird thinks, prevail.

If you are truly mine in spirit, then you must prevail, her mother said.

There is a place you cannot get yourself back from and this is where I am. You will cut your hair like my hair. You will wear my pretty dresses. Your Mickey knows the way.

He wrote notes on the walls and mirrors.

Your friend Suzie called. She was snatched from the jaws of a hippo today. In Botswana, I think. Somewhere. An engine fell off a 747 today. No one was hurt. Kind of funny. I feel sick and scared without you. I have blood from you still on my hands.

And: Going down to the corner. 3 a.m. See you soon. In about 147 hours.

The day isblowing. The leaves flock down and shore against the barn, snagged up together, they twitch. They don’t look right. They don’t look enough like leaves.

Bird goes barefoot through the unhappy grass and finds her boy in the drift of leaves, his pajamas splotched with dew. He has dropped to sleep again, hiding, waiting to be found.

“Up, up,” she says, and tickles him awake.

“Did you see your kiss on the goodbye window I left? I left you an X,” he tells her, “for when I am gone to school.”

“Come, sprocket,” Bird says. “Hully up.”

“Hully up, hully up, hully up,” her boy says, dragging his feet through the dew.

His feet leavewet prints on the kitchen floor that won’t dry until after Bird’s husband is gone, after Bird calls Suzie and Suzie calls Bird and Bird is drunk with the baby and coming apart in the tub upstairs. The dog will drink from the tub while they are in it and lick at the steamed-up faucet. For now, the dog sleeps beside the woodstove. Family dog, dog of the marriage. No Maggie dog, this dog. This one sleeps the years away.

Her boy is reading Babar to this dog, remembering the words. His head on her neck for a pillow.

“She’s dreaming somebody,” Bird’s boy says, “look—” and catches her tail she wags in her sleep.

The baby rocks in her singing seat, thumping softly at the dog’s ribs. A tableau, a scene perfected, luminous and dear.

When my children were small, Bird will come to say, and the scene repeats in her head.

Bird’s husband is still upstairs, hamming it up as he pisses, remembering mighty Achilles — fast runner, killer of men. Shit shower shave: the man will be down soon.

“If I got a gun and shot him, Mama, would it just be me and you?”

“Come eat,” Bird tells him.

Bird’s boy eats down to the army guy face-up in the mealy goo. He spoons the dude out and, with his crazy teeth, crushes his plastic bazooka.

“Those are keeping teeth,” his mother reminds him.

“There’s this kid who he hasn’t lost even one. He still has all his babies.”

The boy blows air up his sister’s nose, who cries, having just gone quiet. It is not enough: he bites her cheek.

“Just you wait,” he tells her.

He tries to wiggle her punky tooth.

“I wish I was still like you,” he tells her.

“Shoes,” says his mother, “backpack. Bus is on its way.”

But does he move?

Nope — doesn’t want to. He has grown up enough he has had the dream of reaching the schoolyard naked. He doesn’t want to go. His stomach hurts him, he says, his head. His head feels like two heads, actually, and the front head is really small.

“Mama, can’t I just stay home, Mama, and lie around with you?”

She keeps still for a beat to love him, loves him, a breath, like a lunatic, before she starts the push out the door. The morning hunt and gather. She finds his coat he flung under the trampoline, permission slips stuffed in the pockets. One glove. Some other kiddo’s cap.

“Here go.”

“No fair,” he says. “It doesn’t fit me.”

He wants his socks that come up like. His handsome shirt, it’s pictures. He wants home lunch. He hates raisins.

“Is this a raisin on my tongue?”

Bird holds a hand out.

“Spit. Now move along.”

“Mama. Mama Mama Mama.”

“Scoot.”

“But really it is. It’s pictures and something’s gooey on my shirt.”

Bird gives in. She stands guard at the end of the driveway while he runs upstairs for his handsome shirt. She listens for the bus to top the hill, listens to the baby cry. She is really belting it out, that baby. But Bird is standing guard. Bird has to flag the bus down. Bird is sort of resting, her mind a little gone.

Her mind is on the day her boy came home from school, first day, a hundred years ago, tattling on ratty Brody.

“Brody said the f word, I promise you he did.”

“The f word?” Bird wondered.

“Yep.”

“But what’s the f word?” Bird wondered.

“ You know. Frow up?”

“He walks inhis sleep, the kid sleep-pees. He pissed last week in the freezer. Pissed in his papa’s shoes. He lies on his back, spitting. Funniest thing you ever saw.”

“He licked the cheese grater,” Bird reported.

“Hit a home run.”

“He hates me, he says, he loves me. He wants to stick me in the eye with a sword.”

“ Pisgetti, he says, and gaky. Bumbanini for bumblebee. A butterfly stood on his nose.”

“I’ve heard enough,” Suzie said.

“There’s more.”

The geese aremoving. The town cat appears with a hummingbird clamped in its shiny mouth, the bird’s spangled wings still shaking — some fickle godhead’s sign. Bird feels her knees, unstrung; her throat seizes: she ought to keep her boy home from school. It isn’t safe, not today. Does that sound right? She can’t shake it.

It feels like mice, Bird’s mother said, nibbling at your throat, when something is on its way.

On its way, Bird thinks, and so you watch for it. You put your shoulder to the wheel: you’re a natural, babe. The model of the natural mother, governing by feel. You see it coming.

But if you don’t?

Or if you do, and look away?

Because what about Calvin Coolidge? Bird thinks. What about his boy, a president’s boy, playing tennis on the courts at the White House? Had there been a sign, some way to know, a feather on the wind, a spider in a hat? The boy blistered his hand playing tennis and from the blister contracted blood poisoning and from the poison was dead in days.

Crazy, the way things happen. Your life is charmed until it isn’t, until a dark day that breaks like a dream.

Bird must have dreamed, to wake so shaken. The dream would come back to her. Something was in it.

Phooey, her mother would say, let the boy go to school.

Let the boy go get milk, Bird thinks — but it’s the last thing you get to say.

Last thing the boy thought is maybe Caroline. Or: I’ll get me some Cheetos, too.

Did that boy’s mother — the neighbor boy’s mother — have an inkling — something — anything — that he would shut the door behind him and never open it again?

A good boy, gone to fetch milk for his mother.

Bird can’t picture him. She pictures the father. The boy’s father strings flowers around the roadside oak the poor boy slammed the family Buick into. Bird sees the man as she saw him last: he walks on his knees, moaning, parting the skittering leaves. When he reaches the place where his boy died, the last place his boy once lived, the father throws himself onto the road. He presses his mouth to the asphalt and scoops up stones with his tongue. He must be waiting, Bird thinks, feeling it out. Lying in the road to divine the hum of what else is yet to be.