Further Interpretations of Real-Life Events (15 page)

“I was waiting for a break to leave,” she says. “I must've miscounted as I was walking from the stairwell. I didn't want to interrupt.”

“Now's the perfect time,” he says. “The time. Is now perfect.” Up close, she perceives in him something begging to be cut and sprung. It makes her cold. He waves a bulbous hand too close to her face. “Bye-bye, Lena. Everyone say good-bye to Lena.”

Everyone says good-bye with more enthusiasm than anyone's ever said good-bye to her. Many of them wave.

“Have a safe trip,” he says.

“Have a safe trip,” the class says.

She stands and quickly walks to the door. “I'm not going on a trip. You don't have to turn it into a big lesson. Lena isn't going on a trip,” she says to the class. “Lena's just leaving.”

Todd laughs a meaningless laugh. “Lena was in the wrong room,” she hears him say as she closes the door. “Lena was not in the correct room.” Everyone else repeats, “Lena was in the wrong room. Lena was not in the correct room.”

She sits on a bus bench in front of the community center, crying for the first time in weeks, covering her face with her hands, mashing the tears back into her eyes. She stays there for a while. Whenever she feels like she might be finished, she pictures herself walking away from the meeting, the class saying,
Lena was not in the correct room
, and it revives her. She could have said that her husband had a rupture in his heart—his heart. Had a rupture—filled a Ziploc bag with water and dropped it on the floor to show the meaning of the word
rupture
. She could've told them she had a new baby and she was waiting to explain everything to the baby so she could explain it to herself. Once upon a time, two people were talking and then one of them left on his bike to go to the post office and then he was gone. Taking a big pill from her pocket, holding it up, and swallowing it to show them what gone was.

A bus stops in front of the bench. The driver opens the door. “I'm not going anywhere,” Lena says. She stands, wipes her eyes.

“You don't have to leave,” he says, studying her over a pair of bifocals. “Slow night. I was just making sure you was okay.”

I'm fine, she says. Benches, she says, they always make me sad.

The driver nods kindly and says something about benches. As he drives off, Lena imagines herself having boarded the bus, so now there are two Lenas, one on the bus and one walking around her neighborhood, again, slowing down in front of lighted houses but not stopping. Along the horizon, the sky is purplish at the lower edges, darker directly above. The sky is deeper there, Lena thinks. If you were going to dive in, this would be where you'd do it.

The other Lena rides through the city, careless, studying herself in a compact mirror. The other Lena quickly comes to an untroubled consensus about her reflection. She is pretty, not flawless but pretty enough to outpace whatever might befall her, lapping it again and again.

Mrs. Appleman is sitting at the base of a pair of date palms in her front yard, tearing bread crusts and throwing them to a pair of squirrels on the sidewalk. “Look how desperate they are,” she says to Lena. The squirrels inch closer to Mrs. Appleman, then scamper back, startled, when she throws the crusts, then again move toward her once they've finished eating. “Those greedy faces remind me of something.”

“How's your night going, Mrs. Appleman?”

She tilts her head to the side, pausing to consider the question. Lena imagines a thought sliding and slowly melting, like butter across a hot pan, toward the fogged bottom half of Mrs. Appleman's mind. Liquefied upon arrival. “Fair to good, I'd say. How about yours, Lena?”

Lena. That word, uttered so often earlier in the community center, echoes on the inside walls of her chest. It slaps her awake. “Do you remember me?”

“I remember everyone,” Mrs. Appleman says, underhanding a crust over the heads of the squirrels. “A man came to my house years ago, offered to buy these two palms here for five hundred dollars. He said he could just dig them up and haul them away for me. I'd never heard such a thing. Ever since then, I look around my neighborhood and I can tell who's been selling their trees. Everyone. I'm probably the only one left.”

Lena feels a door slowly closing. She tries to wait for Mrs. Appleman to finish feeding the squirrels, but a third and fourth squirrel have joined the original two, and Mrs. Appleman continues throwing the crusts to the same squirrel, probably the first one to arrive, and the others won't go near him.

“My husband died last year,” Lena says. “I have a baby, a boy. We live in that gray-and-black house down the street.”

Mrs. Appleman looks at her, tilting her head again. “I know that house. Was he the one buying the trees?”

No, Lena says. She describes Andrew. He was a teacher. They met in the checkout line of a supermarket. He wrote his phone number on a box of Chicken in a Biskit. They eloped, had a courthouse wedding, honeymooned in the Keys. Then he died while riding his bike to the post office. Facts. Nothing not true. “I'm still saving things to tell him,” she says. “I think that's one of my problems.”

Though Mrs. Appleman makes little affirmative sounds while listening, it's impossible to make out any single expression on her face. So thoroughly and intricately wrinkled, it appears animated by several expressions—happiness, sorrow, surprise, pity, reluctance, hope—at once.

Lena says, “You know when you're on the phone and the other person's line goes dead? But you keep talking and after a while you say
hello hello
and there's no answer? I know I need to get myself going again, move on, move away, move up, whatever you're supposed to do.”

“You came over and visited me before, didn't you? With a baby.”

“Lyle,” Lena says. “That's us.”

“Of course,” Mrs. Appleman says. “The looker. That's the kind of baby stays with you when he's gone. He puts his little hand into your mouth, pulls out your fortune, and makes it his own.” She turns her bread bag inside out and dumps the crumbs on the grass in front of her. She hands Lena the empty bag and says, “It's late. I need to be out here in my yard but you should go home and take care of that boy. He better not be all alone.”

“I'm going,” Lena says.

Heading up Boylston, she studies the houses next to Mrs. Appleman's. Their motion-activated porch lights turn on when she walks by. At certain hours, houses talk in their sleep, forgiving their occupants for the injuries of the day. In single file, unspeaking, each day stands next to the ones before it and after it. She and Andrew met in the morning, fell in love in the afternoon, and were married in the evening. Tomorrow he will be gone. Facts. Nothing not true. Tomorrow he'll be everywhere.

She doesn't go home. She circles the block, turns right turns right turns right, and finds herself back at Mrs. Appleman's. The old woman hasn't moved from the base of the date palm. She looks up, smiles, and waves when she sees Lena approaching.

“When we were talking,” Lena says, “I was still trying to figure out how I was going to explain it to him when I get home. What to leave out and what to include.”

“Him who, sweetheart?”

“Andrew. The man we were just talking about.”

Mrs. Appleman squints at Lena. It's fully night now. Her front yard is illuminated by a pair of floodlights above the garage. “Lena,” she says, staring at Lena's chest straight to her drab organs.

“That's me. Remember Lyle?”

“Lena. L-E-N-A.” She taps out the letters on Lena's chest, just below her clavicle. Lena looks down and sees the name tag from the meeting. “What brings you out on this big dark night?”

No recognition, just a smiling reserve. Lena can't believe it. She's been gone for five minutes at the most. She wants to grip Mrs. Appleman by the shoulders and shake her and say, “How can you not remember?”

The old woman's face is besieged by happiness. Each moment for her exists singly, like a nest, or an island, or a song. “I knew someone named Lena,” she says. “It's nice to finally meet another.” She raises her arm to suggest a vast space. “This is my neighborhood.”

the big finish

E
veryone on the ship calls Hayes the birdman, except for the birds, who call him Ned. Ned must have been the name of the ship's previous birdman, because Hayes's name is Hayes. The birds say it with a Dixie accent:
Nay-ed.
The previous birdman taught them some nasty habits and Hayes doesn't know enough about birds to unteach them. He knows very little about birds actually. He applied for a job as a line cook, and when the recruiter asked about his previous experience working in a dog-grooming van years ago, he explained it was one of the most worthwhile things he'd ever done.

“I wasn't just clipping dogs,” Hayes told him in the man's office. “I was changing how they felt about themselves. Dogs can't talk, of course, but during that final brushing, their expression would be like, ‘I am not the same dog.' ”

The recruiter scribbled into his notepad—Hayes calculated by the intensity of the scribbling that he was doing either very poorly or very well. The man asked Hayes what he knew about birds.

“Well,” Hayes said, “I know I could spend the rest of my life admiring their liberty, their proud majesty. I know their pull is ancient.”

Hayes, still living in the small college town he moved to after high school, had been feeling, but not acting, his age. He was thirty-five, a rundown version of himself at age twenty. He needed out. He needed, he decided the moment the recruiter brought up the birds, to be traveling on a commercial cruise liner around the island-littered Caribbean, performing poolside with two African gray parrots. And maybe a business card that said simply: T
.
R
.
H
AYES,
S
HOWMAN
.

“Majesty,” the recruiter repeated. “I like that.”

“I've also worked with rabbits,” Hayes said. He hadn't put the rabbits on his résumé. He'd been trying to forget the rabbits. “And mice.” He'd been trying to forget the mice, too.

The recruiter scribbled even more ardently. Hayes was doing really well! Or really poorly! When the recruiter was finished, he said, “You seem like a man equipped to appreciate the unusual needs of our birds.”

And Hayes was, he is. Under the right conditions, he can muster enthusiasm toward just about anything. Birds, spiders, turtlenecks, olives. He's been working on the ship for almost six months. He entertains kids. He smiles and says hello to everyone he makes eye contact with. He lugs his personality around like milk in a big open pail, sloshing it all over the place. It's one of the discount cruise liners, advertised in the free newspaper. Stakes are agreeably low.

“I am the birdman,” he tells a group of children gathered on the sundeck, “and these are my birds, Chick and Tara. I wasn't always the birdman. Before the birds I worked with dogs and I was the dogman; before dogs, it was rabbits, and I was the rabbitman; before the rabbits,
mice
. . .”

His manner is untilled, vaguely Ottoman. He washes his hands constantly and this morning there are two wet marks on the front of his pants, one large, one small: a planet and its moon.

“Come, come closer,” he says, and the children step forward. Their faces remind him of expensive bicycles left unlocked. What's he doing? Hayes doesn't always know. He tries to startle the children more than he bores, but he doesn't want to mar them. Irina's first rule of working with children: Do not mar. But Hayes has trouble gauging his effect. Their open, solicitous faces, their anticipation—he's tempted to alarm them with things that are loud and untrue. To say, for instance, “Kids, it would be an honor to make love to all of your aunts and great-aunts and mothers, one by one, on a picnic table. Even the very old ones. Afterward I would have a special trophy made, to look at when the time comes and I'll never again have the volition to make love on a picnic table.”

Irina's second, third, and fourth rules of working with children: Refrain, refrain, refrain. Irina is Hayes's boss.

He says, “I need to tell you kids something incredible. Chick and Tara, their wings aren't clipped. They could fly away right now if they wanted, but they'd rather stay here to entertain you.”

The children study the birds, Chick on the left and Tara on the right. Their feathers are rose-petal soft and their compact bodies are ashy-gray, darkening to black in their faces, as if something foul and heavy is concentrated there. Because the birds are so uneager to entertain, every show is different and exactly the same. Today, well before the finale, the children grow bored and wander off to the kiddie pool to watch an obese shirtless man with chest pains having his blood pressure taken.

Do not stop the show.
Another Irina rule. Even if no one is watching, continue like you're performing at the Met to a crowd of all the people who've ever wronged you or doubted you or failed to grasp crucial aspects of your personality.

“The big finish!” Hayes says, and Chick and Tara take flight, ascend, and orbit the ship, twenty yards portside and twenty yards starboard. It still gives him a queasy thrill. When they return and alight on their spruce post, Hayes sees resignation in their cracked eyes. He feels resignation himself, feels it like a kite string dangling above his stretched hand. They could easily fly off to St. Croix, Cuba, Dominica to live like dignitaries among fruit groves, but here they are. They say, and he has no reason not to believe them, apart from the fact that he doesn't believe them, that they'd miss him.

“That's our show, kids,” he says, loud enough for them to hear him at the kiddie pool. The shirtless man is being given a bottle of water now. Some of the kids are clapping for him. Hayes unlatches the cage and Chick and Tara toddle inside.

“Ned,” Tara says. “Poor poor Ned.”

“Our man,” Chick says. “Loyal Ned. Courage. Striking.”

“Hayes,”
he tells the birds. “Can you say
Hayes
? Ned's long gone, he hasn't worked here in months. He went back to junior college to study small-engine repair. Do you understand? He left you to spend time with small engines.”

“Ned won't leave,” Tara says. “Blood Ned. Roots.”

“Here.” He dumps a giant Ziploc of honeydew into their cage. “Have a treat.” The birds loudly devour the honeydew as he wheels them back to their cabin, thankful, silent, thankfully silent.

A
fter the show, he and the birds are supposed to have forty-five minutes alone together every day. Meaningful contact, the instruction manual calls it, which means him sitting shirtless on the bed in his cabin, telling Chick and Tara about himself while they scrutinize him from their massive cage.

Hayes approached the assignment earnestly at first. He liked the job and aimed to keep it. He told the birds about his childhood, about college. He described his former jobs. He started with the dogs.

He told them about a Seeing Eye dog named Nimbus he once groomed. When he was done, the owner, a woman in her thirties, said, “Well, that's the sorriest haircut I've ever seen.” Hayes apologized—maybe she was only partially blind—but she said she was joking. She invited him inside and showed everything Nimbus could do. He could turn lights off and on, and could work the ceiling-fan remote; he even barked when the oven was finished preheating.

The blind woman was not unattractive, Hayes explained to the birds. She had gray eyes with white whites. She wore a matching blue outfit and Hayes concocted a scenario where the woman tried on different clothes and Nimbus barked when she found ones that matched. Maybe he really liked a certain shirt and would pretend it matched when it didn't. Hayes imagined Nimbus enjoyed seeing her in her underwear, so he let her go through six or seven outfits before barking. But didn't the woman know dogs were color-blind? Or that he just wanted to see her in her underwear? Hayes felt sorry for her until he remembered that it was his fantasy, and then he felt sorry for himself.

While Hayes talked, the birds preened themselves in the mirror attached to their cage, seemingly ignoring him. Their cage, multitiered and filled with ropes and beads, took up nearly half of his cabin, which was why he was permitted to room alone, sort of alone.

The blind woman, Hayes continued, then asked if he would cut
her
hair. He said he hadn't been trained to cut human hair, but she insisted. He brought her and Nimbus into the unit—this is what they called the dog-grooming van, the
unit
—cut her bangs, trimmed an inch off the back. Looking at Nimbus, Hayes saw his haircut was indeed sorry. Hanks of hair on his legs, fur between his paws. He wore a vest with a patch that said
DON'T PET ME, I'M WORKING.

Hayes visited the blind woman many times after that. Whenever they made love, Nimbus began to bark, as if Hayes might be injuring her. “It's okay!” she yelled from under him. “It's okay! It's okay!” It was sort of off-putting. Soon she had to shut Nimbus in the laundry room before they went to her bedroom, but he barked anyway, quick distant lurching barks like a werewolf's heartbeat.

“She was remarkable,” he told the birds. “She used her hands as eyes. I still think about her all the time.”

“Enough, Ned,” the bigger bird, Chick, said. “Make it night now.”

This was the first time he'd heard either of them speak. He thought it might be a canned phrase, something they used in the show.

Tara lifted one of her talons to her mouth, delicately chewed a black nail. She said, “Rub out. Retreat. Smolder. Make it night.”

Hayes found the cover and slipped it over their cage. He lay down listening to what he first took to be steady, sleepful breathing. He listened and listened until he had no doubt: the birds were whispering to each other.

“The laundry room,” he heard one of them repeat. “The laundry room.”

O
ften, very often lately, Hayes has the urge to run around the ship yelling, “Man overboard! Man overboard!” The budget-cruise-goers are so fearless and serene. All they care about is finding out what time the midnight buffet is, or what the complimentary daiquiris cost. Near the pool, men tee up golf balls and drive them into the ocean. Wind-crazed gulls trail the ship toward deeper water. “No land in sight!” he wants to yell. They need to be snatched from their stupor. They need to remember a time when an open sea
meant
something.

Hayes doesn't run around yelling, “Man overboard!” He's required to smile and say hello to any guest he makes eye contact with. It's become a game: staring guests down, begging them to look at him, so he can smile and say hello.

Today Irina, the children's activities coordinator, comes to see his show. Quality control. Irina is a thick, officious Dutchwoman in drugstore bifocals who can adjust, with a swift clap of her hands, the alignment of planets. She scares Hayes, but the children can't get enough of her. They fight over who sits in her lap during the show, and then over who sits on either side of her, in front of her, behind her. “All right, that's enough,” she says to a boy who tries to climb up her back. “I am not a monkey bars.”

The children, every eight days a new group of children, love this.

“I am the birdman,” he tells them.

With Irina in attendance, the children sit still through the entire show, they listen. They volunteer. Hayes places Tara on the shoulder of a sunburned little girl with a single rasta-ribboned braid tucked behind her ear.

“Can anyone tell me where Chick and Tara come from?” he asks.

“Eggs!” a kid guesses.

“Panama!”

“TV!”

“Her claws kind of hurt,” the little girl says. “They're digging in.”

“That means she's imprinting on you,” he says, tapping the spruce post twice. “She doesn't imprint on everyone.” Tara hops off the girl and Chick leans in as if to preen Tara, but Hayes know she's whispering.

“There's a secret word,” he tells the children. “And if I say that word, even accidentally, my birds will fly away and leave me forever. What will I do then?”

He doesn't know what he's saying. If Irina weren't there, sitting in the center of the group and nodding solemnly, the children would've wandered off by now.

“You'll cry!” one of the children guesses.

“You'll find a new animal! You'll be the something-else-man!”

“It was a rhetorical question,” Hayes says. “Does anyone know what a rhetorical question is?”

No one answers, so either they don't know or they do.

After the show, as he wheels the birds back to their cabin, Irina stops him in the hallway. She places a hand on his arm and says, “Your show, it was so . . . I don't even have a word. Yes I do: lapidary. It was lapidary. I can still feel it, to be honest, in my lap.”

“No,” Tara says. “No no no no no.”

Irina leans in close to the cage, the tendons in her neck quivering and sleek as a frog's thigh. “Is he all right?” Irina asks.

“She,” Hayes says. “She's fine. Sometimes she just needs to exercise her, uh, thing.”

“Ah,” Irina says. “Me too.”

“Make it night,” Chick says. “Bye now. Bye-bye, hungry lady.”

“You'll be getting all superiors on your report.”

“All right,” Hayes says.

Voice
is the word he wants. Sometimes she exercises her voice. He's too distracted by Irina's gravitation and ruddy Dutchness. She makes him feel like he's been caught eavesdropping. She still holds his arm. He feels her hand's heat and his arm's heat producing its own heat, and the feeling is alternately disconcerting and fine.

“We have to go now.” Hayes starts wheeling the cage down the hall, whisper-hissing at the birds. “We should do this again sometime.”

Back in the cabin, Chick says, “Ned manhandled. Ned bully by her thing.”

“I wasn't manhandled.” He pushes the cage against the wall and watches the birds watch him. Their expressions, their bodies give no indication of what they're about to say. “I actually felt okay back there. She seems interesting.”