Diana Abu-Jaber - Birds of Paradise

When he moved out to attend — and drop out of — college, and then to open his market, she began to feel differently about him. She missed him: not in the way she pined for Felice, but quietly, a steadily building sensation. Mostly they talk only when Brian calls him, then she’ll come on the line, her voice furtive and supplicant: conscious of old transgressions. The phone seems to breathe with a kind of crinkling static — the long pauses between them. These days, he is busy and successful. She is proud of him, of course, though there is something in her that holds aloof from the notion of a market — the gulf between a shopkeeper and an artisan.

She places her hand on the phone, breathes deeply, trying to think of a reason for calling him. “Not now,” she tells herself sternly. “Not until you’ve done some solid work.” She will not let herself cry. Crying cracks you open. Better to cry over pointless things, she thinks, like burning the butter, than things that matter. Or things you can’t pin down. “Justify your existence a little.” Her voice is eerie in the still kitchen. Justify your existence — that sounds good and hard, like something Stanley might say to her.

Avis goes to her desk: there’s a fat folder of work orders for macarons and petits fours for corporate banquets and graduations — tiresome, debilitating, pointless cakes! She lowers her face into the blankness of her palms. It comes to her, clear as thought: a familiar repetitive rasp that swoops into a human register. A woman crying or laughing, but in an eerily regulated way. She lifts her face from her hands, gazing around. Rising like a sleepwalker, she moves through the house, tracking the sound, then opens the French doors at the rear of the dining room. Their backyard was built for children — a grassy expanse containing shaggy old gardens, a kidney-shaped pool, a green rope hammock — bordered by a copse of coconut palms and cycads, dense bamboo, a young palmyra palm, and the rambling avocado. A mild wind has come up, rustling the foliage. The weird repeating noise is louder outside but less objectionable. Avis circles the pool and walks to the limit of their property, to the palms. She pushes the fronds back and peeps between the wicklike trunks. Their backyard looks into the Mastersons’ on the right, the Regaleses’ directly behind, and on the left, the Calvadoses’. The Calvados had retired to Savannah and rented their house to a professor at UM and his family, but the man had confided to Avis last fall that they were sick of the heat and hurricanes and planned to return to Asheville.

It occurs to Avis, as she pushes aside more fronds, that it’s been a long time since she’s been in her own backyard. She steps onto the knuckly base of the Calvadoses’ avocado tree and, looking through the palms into their yard, she sees an array of brilliant orchids, vibrant and implausible as daubs of paint, knobby roots hanging from the eaves of the house in halved coconut husks. A rope clothesline stretches from the corner of the house (Gables code infraction) lipped with hinged and straight wooden pins, displaying white underwear, shirts, and an ecru dress, wash-worn and translucent in the sun. The musty smell of the orchids reaches her along with that of a gardenia — sweetness with a sharp, peppery center. Avis is mesmerized by the lines of the glowing dress, the rustling undulance of the trees. She steps deeper into the shrubbery and palms, nearly into the neighbors’ yard, and then she spots the big cage.

It’s near the rear of the house, maybe six feet high, a bronze birdcage with a domed top — beautiful and baroque yet roughly wrought. Inside, hunkered down, casting back and forth, a wet black shadow. It shifts to and fro, sidestepping. It lifts its head, so Avis catches a flash of beak, and makes its grating prehistoric noise. Its feathers ruffle up, then sleek back into a blue-black reflection. Its rasping elides into eerie human noise — somewhere between a sob and laugh — then rises to a piercing frequency that sails through Avis’s body. The bird breaks off, goes back into that hunkered, mad, side-stepping motion, lifts its feathers, smooths them, and begins to render a pitch-perfect imitation of a little boy shrieking, sounding to Avis like, Non! Non! Donnez-moi! Donnez-moi! Avis flinches, rankled by the screaming. Who keeps such a bird in a cage? Big as a monkey. Huge and slick and oily.

She pushes aside the reedy palms and steps into the Calvadoses’ backyard. The shrieking bird breaks off, apparently shocked into silence by this figure bursting from the trees, then reverts to a frenetic shuffling motion. “Uh, uh, uh, uh!” it cries, as if stumped. It’s hard to see the creature clearly through the curving bars of its cage, but Avis notices a bit of bright orange on the beak: a mynah. “Uh! Uh! Uh! Uh!” it goes on, scrabbling and sobbing, a small, desolate minotaur.

Avis strides past the cage, her mind compressed into something murderous. How long has she been listening to this racket anyway? The noise is enough to drive anyone mad… she moves along the side of the house, noting the blistered paint, warped windowsills, frowsy, intricate weeds popping up between the bricks of the walkway. She doesn’t remember the house looking so unkempt when the professor was living there.

As she walks to the front of the house, however, it occurs to Avis that this is not the socially accepted way to approach a stranger’s home. If anyone is home — perhaps washing dishes, looking out the back window — they might well notice her creeping around in her apron and clogs. Avis stops in the neighbors’ front yard. Had she been about to walk right up and knock on that door? In that instant, all she can imagine is how horrified Brian would be, his concern with the opinions of others, and how he loves to remind her: “You might not want to deal with the public, but I do .” Unnerved, Avis touches her hair, proceeds to the sidewalk in front of the house, makes a right, and walks all the way down the block to Salzedo as if she’s just out for a stroll. She makes a left on Salzedo, another left onto Viscaya, and goes home.

THE NOISE CYCLES through a repertoire. There are the sounds of the child’s cries, sharp as chips of ice. Then, somehow more intolerably, the sounds of a woman’s tremulous laughter that transform into sobbing, then back to laughter: thick, raw sounds. Avis squints into the light.

Propped on a small easel she uses for orders and ingredient lists is a request for a gâteau Saint-Honoré bearing the legend Together, Toujours in scrolling Edwardian script. She attempts to calm herself with her work. It’s a nicely time-consuming cake, though Avis finds it distasteful to deface her pastries with these slogans — even Happy Birthday —using fine creations as billboards. Today’s order, from a Cutler Road matriarch, is an anniversary commandment— till death do us … Avis embarks on the journey of the cake which will require both the work of pâte feuilletée and the pâte à choux, a carefully timed caramel, a crème patissière, as well as a crème Chantilly . She has barely begun the long folding and kneading for the puff — her fingers already reddened from the chilled slab — when the bird noise seems to reach a new crescendo. Avis kneads, then overkneads — the sound like a finger rubbing at a sore spot, a fiery shrieking: Fie! Fie! Fie! Fiiiiiiiiiie!

What was it Brian was always talking about? Strategy, organization, plan of attack? “Plan of attack,” she says out loud, staring at the windows. “Plan, plan, plan.”

She goes to the computer on her little desk, switches to New Document, and begins writing:

Dear Neighbor: