Diana Abu-Jaber - Birds of Paradise

Welcome to the neighborhood. Obviously ours is a “close-knit” neighborhood — there isn’t a lot of space between our houses! While I’m certain you mean no harm, I have to tell you, when you put your parrot outside in the morning, it begins making a lot of noise. Surely the bird is just lonely for you — you probably work away from home. I, on the other hand, like many others — have a home business. There is no such “escape” for me. I need some peace and quiet in order to concentrate, and the bird makes this impossible for me. Its voice is piercing — it can be heard in every room of our house, even with all the doors and windows shut. It is a hideous assault — it starts before dawn and screeches without cease. If you don’t do something immediately to silence the creature, we will be FORCED to contact the authorities and…

The noise beats on outside her window, a remorseless, piercing caw.

Avis stops and glares at the screen, fingers trembling, she writes:

Damn DAMNDAMNITALLTOHELL

She prints out the letter, gets up, goes into the bathroom, splashes cold water on her face. Avis returns to the desk and reads what she’s written: she sounds so crazy that it frightens her.

AVIS PUTS ASIDE the Saint-Honoré and decides to embark on a new pastry. She’s assembling ingredients when the phone rings in the next room. She ignores it as she arranges her new mise en place . This recipe is constructed on a foundation of hazelnuts — roasted, then roughed in a towel to help remove skins. These are ground into a gianduja paste with shaved chocolate, which she would normally prepare in her food processor, but today she would rather smash it together by hand, using a meat tenderizer on a chopping block. She pounds away and only stops when she hears something that turns out to be Nina’s voice on the answering machine:

“… Ven, Avis, you ignoring me? Contesta el telefono! I know you’re there. Ay, you know what — you’re totally impossible to work for…”

Avis starts pounding again. Her assistants never last more than a year or two before something like this happens. They go stale, she thinks: everything needs to be turned over. Composted.

She feels invigorated, punitive and steely as she moves through the steps of the recipe. It was from one of her mother’s relatives, perhaps even Avis’s grandmother — black bittersweets — a kind of cookie requiring slow melting in a double boiler, then baking, layering, and torching, hours of work simply to result in nine dark squares of chocolate and gianduja tucked within pieces of pâte sucrée . The chocolate is a hard, intense flavor against the rich hazelnut and the wisps of sweet crust — a startling cookie. Geraldine theorized that the cookie must have been invented to give to enemies: something exquisitely delicious with a tiny yield. The irony, from Avis’s professional perspective was that while one might torment enemies with too little, it also exacted an enormous labor for such a small revenge.

The luxuriously laborious process takes Avis into late afternoon: ignoring the flicker of pain in her lower back, intent on her anger (she imagines going next door, offering cookies, making a gentle complaint, and all the ways her neighbor will be mortified). Eventually Avis arranges the bittersweets on a footed silver tray delicately limned in tarnish, stretches plastic wrap over this, then walks out her front door.

Their neighbor’s back door is perhaps sixty feet away on a diagonal line across the backyard. But Avis climbs in the car, tray of cookies beside her, makes a left on Viscaya, a left on Salzedo, a left on Camillo, pulls up in front of 378, and parks.

The bird cry pierces the closed windows of the car: it seems to have assumed a higher, shrieking, Dopplerized frequency, sawing into the very bones of her cranium. Avis holds the tray aloft on one back-bent hand — the way they whisked out the pastry trays at the Demitasse. On the tray, propped beside the cookies, is a handwritten note on one of her catering cards bordered by vines and blossoms: Welcome to the neighborhood! The shriek heightens vertiginously, migrainously, as she walks up the red-bricked driveway. The house itself is a canary-yellow stucco with old flat white roof tiles; royal blue awnings extend over the windows and blue Moorish tiles line the concrete step. There’s no car in the neighbors’ driveway, not even a battered Tercel or Quattro for domestic help. Avis decides to leave her plate and card on the front step and flee: she feels a rush of adrenaline, an impish sense of trespassing. Geckos skitter like sprites across the walkway as she approaches. She hesitates, imagines this neighbor coming home to a plate of nibbled cookies, chocolate webbed footprints. There’s no protected place to leave the cookies on the wide stone hip of the front entry. She stands before the front door, agonizing. Finally she grasps the brass circle on the door and gives it three raps.

No answer. She waits, squinting into the dark mantle of trees on this block. Two more raps. She turns to go when the front door hisses open. Startled, Avis turns back. The parrot noise ceases, and stillness, an unearthly afternoon silence, rises from the earth. A slight woman with dark brown skin stands in the doorway. She’s wearing an old-fashioned cotton garment with rickrack around the neck and hem — the sort of thing that used to be called a housedress. Her face is neutral, open, almost drowsy — as if she had just awakened from a nap — but her mouth is firm. She doesn’t speak or smile: she stands there waiting, her eyes two glimmering black dashes.

“I… made… these…” Avis hazards. “Hello.”

The woman doesn’t look at the plate. She stares at Avis. Avis senses a rising, palm-dampening fever. Half of Miami doesn’t speak English. She tries a word or two of her humiliating Spanish, “Yo… estoy… una… vecino… um, vecina…” Nothing.

Now the woman seems impatient, eager to return to her nap. She steps back, the door narrows a fraction of an inch, and Avis notes that she doesn’t feel the vapor of air-conditioning that exudes from most homes in the Gables. Her gaze flits up: the louvered windows of the house are tilted open. In late August, no less. Open invitation to mold. She holds up the plate again. “This is for you. Para usted? To say welcome to the neighborhood. Saludad . Also, I want to tell you that in the morning? When you leave it outside — your parrot— su… um … pajaro? es… un poco… ” She makes circular, feathery gestures with her hands. “Your bird is too loud.”

The woman’s faint right eyebrow appears to lift.

“So. Well.” Now Avis feels impossibly foolish, certain the woman doesn’t speak English. She must be the housekeeper after all — sleeping on the job. Probably an illegal. “These cookies… for the people who live here,” she says slowly, lifting the plate practically into the woman’s chest. But she does not take them. Finally Avis relents and places the tray on the entryway at the woman’s feet. Let the lizards have them! She dusts off her skirt as she straightens up. The woman’s eyes are wider now, though her lower face remains immobile. “Whoever it belongs to — that goddamn bird,” Avis says, “is driving me out of my mind.” She gives the woman a brisk wave and walks off the step.

THE BACK OF GAVIN HENNIGAN’S BENZ IS DUSKY with late-afternoon light, a miraculously dry August day. The near-evening could have been plucked from any number of near-evenings from Brian’s college life — riding around with friends, a beer held beneath the dash. He feels good — it’s been a while since he’s felt pressure at the center of his chest or had to sweat his way awake through the lonely middle-of-the-night.