Diana Abu-Jaber - Birds of Paradise

She stands in the doorway. “I’m just a worker bee.”

Eduardo opens the truck and slides in the cooler. “He says you’re a genius.”

“Stanley?” Her voice is quiet. “Really did he say that?” She averts her eyes. “About me?”

He shrugs. “You know, with the Haitians, there’s a pretty interesting relationship to sugarcane — if you’re interested. It’s sacred to them.” He opens the van door and props his arm on it. “But it’s pretty horrible. They have to harvest it for other people and they starve. You and her should talk about sugar some time.”

When Avis returns to the house, the air inside feels like the bottom of a well. She browses through her work folder, stuffed with orders on slips and receipts: Monday — cinn. palmiers — the Morris Group. PI&B — mocha cr. puffs, 5 Saint-Honorés. Winslow Co. retreat 20 plum tarts… She tries to plan the day’s baking schedule but she keeps putting down her pen, returning to the French doors, cracking them, leaning out into the damp air. How still it is in the hottest part of the day! Just a minor insect whir, a few random bird notes — everything deadened by molten heat. She returns to the kitchen: the woman and her bird have gone in for the day. Why doesn’t she feel relieved?

FOR TWO DAYS, Avis sneaks out of the kitchen after she’s set out dough for the first rising, to climb into the densest section of overgrowth, among webs and rotting avocados and palmetto bugs — muck, spores, and tiny-legged things falling into her hair or down the back of her shirt. From there, she watches the neighbor pull what seem to be weeds, bundling them neatly in the lap of her apron. The woman wears a bib apron like the sort Avis’s grandmother wore — white, tied with strings behind the neck and waist. Under this, she wears a variety of simple housedresses in honeyed colors, turquoise, sea green, lavender, and pale rose, usually some sort of kerchief tied over her hair. From a distance, she looks delicate as a girl, but Avis suspects she is just a bit younger than herself. While she gardens or hangs laundry, she sings or murmurs to the mynah who waddles nearby and occasionally attempts to climb the fabric of her dresses. She speaks in a rapid, staccato language that Avis think must be Creole: the bird often responds in exactly her voice, mirroring each word: bonswa, bonswa, souple, pa fe sa … Watching this woman gives Avis such pleasure — the rhythm of the woman’s voice, the filigree of birdsong in the trees, the atlas of breezes carrying jasmine, vanilla, and gardenia — even the sweetness of the rotting mulch and briny air bewitches her.

That Thursday, Avis leaves the kitchen the moment Brian departs, wiping her hands on her apron, and goes to the place in the fronds. She presses against the avocado trunk, hidden under a screen of leaves. Rain begins misting through the fronds: the cloud cover turns the morning sky into a emerald post-dusk hue, mixing things up. Soon she sees the back door nudged open by a brown foot, a flicker of pink toenails: the woman emerges in an old lemon-colored shift — bateau neck, sleeveless — beneath an apron. She places a metal pot on the ground, then sits beside it on the cement step, just under the eave of the house. There’s a pile of leaves in her apron, as usual, and she sets to work, stripping pieces of greenery, tossing part, throwing the rest in the pot. After she has worked methodically for some minutes, the woman begins to sing. Avis strains to hear: it’s a syrupy old tune she’s heard somewhere before. Mon amour, je t’attendrai toute ma vie… Oh mon amour, ne me quitte pas . Her voice is thin but on-key. Avis releases a breath and the fragile sounds of air and insects are part of that diastole. She is so relaxed she is almost drowsing.

Out of the corner of her eye then, just breaching her peripheral vision, she spots a movement like a brush of premonition. Lamb’s orange form creeps past her, belly low, warbling and chirping — his gray eyes on the mynah.

The woman spots Lamb nearly at the same time and gets to her feet. “Hsst. Bad, bad!” She kicks in Lamb’s direction, the cat flattening but not retreating. The mynah releases a piercing awgh and lifts its black wings like a villain’s cape. Lamb freezes in mid-stalk, the bird puffs up larger, hopping forward, shrieking aawgh, aawgh! Certain her cat — which had once belonged to Felice — is about to be eviscerated, Avis bounds from her hiding place, fronds and leaves flying, into the neighbor’s yard and scoops up the tabby, simultaneously catching flashes of the flapping bird, the woman’s hand fanned at her throat. Avis hurries back through the leaves, across the yard, through the French doors, and tosses the cat so it yowls, midair, and falls on the couch.

Avis stands with her back to the French doors, shaking and out of breath. Slowly, she risks a glance and sees the woman has followed her through the palms and now stands in Avis’s yard. She is rigidly furious, arms akimbo, fists balled. “You are watching us!” the woman shouts, her voice elongated. Avis wavers in the door, her hand trembling on the frame. “I’m terribly sorry,” she mumbles. “I’d swear I’d pulled that door shut — they swell up in the rainy season…”

“Who are you, lady?” The woman is implacable. “What do you want?”

Avis takes a few meek steps outside. She clasps her hands at her waist. “Oh, I’m so — I was just — I was doing some — I was in my garden — and — I heard some voices. I heard you, I think — and I — and I—”

The woman’s eyes dart around the overgrown yard. She squints at Avis, chin forward. “How long you been watching me?”

Avis lowers her head. She feels breathless and woozy. “A while.”

“ A while ,” the woman says in her contrapuntal way. “A while, yes.” Something relaxes in the filament of the woman’s eyes. “You aren’t altogether in possession of yourself, are you?”

She looks different here, in another context. Avis sees she is very small — a good head shorter, possibly thirty pounds lighter than Avis. Her yellow dress, kerchief, and gold-beaded earrings glow as if absorbing energy from her body. The woman’s eyes tick over her, inventorying, then she turns her head slightly and backs away. She moves toward the palms, shoves them aside, and walks through.

THE NEXT MORNING, Avis draws a comb through her wet hair and the tines fill with strands. Under the bathroom light, she stares at her reflection; her skin looks depleted and she believes she can divine the round shape of her skull through the hair. A dermatologist had told her last month that her hair would quit falling eventually. Probably hormonal, she’d said, adding with the condescension of the young: Our bodies change. Her mother had warned that Avis would get fat from baking. Now Avis looks at her hard little wire of a smile: Geraldine had said nothing about going bald. Avis scoops her remaining hair in one hand, tilts the scissors in the other, and snaps away furiously. “Here you go!” she says to the mirror with a big smile. “Happy Birthday, Felice! Happy Birthday to you!” It takes just a few minutes to lop it all off, so what remains — about two to four inches — juts from her head in a tufted silver and brown corona. She pushes it back and tucks what she can behind her ears before tying a slim silk band around her hairline — loose hairs a disaster for baking. She sweeps the bathroom floor and wipes the sink, listening to the neighbor’s bird chatter in the other yard.

Avis returns to her desk, skin still humid from the shower, her left hand combing the blunt ends of her hair. With her right hand, she browses through the rest of the day’s orders: cinnamon palmiers; pistachio-cocoa 12-layer torte … She gazes at this order a moment, her pulse elevated, as if she’s been drinking too much coffee, and she begins jotting notes on a new pastry: For this cake, I want to mingle the womanly and masculine foods — sugars and meats in particular. The walls must come down. Must temper, must balance. Add the leeks to the chocolate, vanilla to the turnip. Tear away the sacred walls between the sweet and savory worlds . She stops and rereads what she’s written: what does it mean? Again she hears the mynah singing in the neighbor’s yard.