Rare Birds: Stories

Rare Birds, 1959-2

“I’ve looked into it before,” Mary said, speaking over her. “I could do it by myself, but it would be costly, he would fight me tooth and nail. It’s really mine, you see. Doug manages the restaurant and that’s our income, but he started it with my money.” She stared at her clenching hands. “The divorce is useless to me unless I can keep the restaurant, and he’ll fight me for it. Unless I can show a judge what he really is.” She met Elsa’s gaze squarely. “I’ll make it worth your while, don’t you worry.”

“But I can’t tell Robert,” Elsa said. She had started weeping again. “I couldn’t last night … and if I tell him now he’ll ask himself, why didn’t she tell me when it happened?” She looked beseechingly at Mary. “Please, I just want to forget. I don’t care about the job, we’ll get by. I just want to forget.”

“Then Doug will say he fired you, and he’ll spread it around that you propositioned him.” Mary spoke the words flatly. “I know how he works, I’ve seen it before. I married an animal,” she added under her breath. “A goddamn animal.”

Elsa understood the words, understood what they meant, but still she couldn’t quite believe it; it felt as if it was all happening to someone else. Finally, she asked, “Will I have to appear in court?”

“No. Just tell my lawyer what happened. Once you sign the papers you’ll be done with it all.”

“And the police? Won’t they want … evidence?”

Mary snorted. “Who said anything about the police? There’s no point in telling them anything. You washed away all the evidence.” When Elsa began crying harder she took her hand, holding it as if she was unsure of what to do with it. “Look, Elsa. Even if you hadn’t cleaned … you know, we both know that wouldn’t have been enough. They’d have wanted to see bruises, ripped clothes; they’d want witnesses who heard you hollering for your life. You know it, I know it, and God help us, Doug knows it.”

Elsa stared down at the shimmering white and yellow on her plate. “I don’t know,” she whispered. “I don’t know.”

“I’ll tell you what I know: what I’m offering you is the only thing that will get you out of this without putting your family on skid row.” She suddenly squeezed Elsa’s hand, so hard Elsa yelped in pain. “You can’t survive without two salaries. I can see it just by looking at this place. I’ll pay you what you were getting, and you won’t even have to work for it. You just have to help me get rid of him.”

Elsa’s fingers were starting to go numb. Only then did she notice on the back of Mary’s tightly gripping hand was a spray of fine, red bumps like pimples, each with a tiny black center. Where had they come from?

“What about your little boy?” she whispered.

Mary’s grip increased. “Better he grow up without a father, than be raised by the likes of him.”

The taste of egg in Elsa’s mouth was like something rotting. She couldn’t think on what to say or do, she could only sit there, her eyes endlessly leaking and her hand tingling and throbbing. At last she nodded and sighed with relief when Mary let go. She brought her sore hand to her chest, massaging it to bring the blood back to her fingertips.

And then she held out her hand between them, staring as a rash of red dots broke out across her knuckles.

She stayed home sick for three days.

On the fourth day Elsa told Robert she was going to the doctor, but instead of going to their family doctor she went to a specialist. There she handed over her small savings and took off her blouse, showing him the bumps everywhere: patches on her back, on her arms, all with different shades of brown at their centers.

She did not tell him how she opened one with a straight pin and teased forth a tiny brown feather, wet with a clear liquid, spreading its miniscule barbules as it emerged into the light of the bathroom.

The specialist gave her a cream that cost her the grocery money in her pocketbook, suggested she change her laundry detergent, and sent her on her way.

On the fifth day Elsa told Robert she was going back to work, but instead she put on her best day dress and dark stockings and a long-sleeved jacket and gloves and went to the heart of the city, where she met Mary at her lawyer’s office. There, she told what had happened in a small, sobbing voice, ashamed to raise her eyes despite the lawyer’s gentle tone and the hand he laid over hers. While they typed it up properly she drank a very strong cup of coffee and wondered why everything felt so wrong: why she didn’t feel better for telling, why Mary still looked so grim, why everyone else looked so pleased at hearing what had happened.

When the typist brought in the clean copy she reached for a pen to sign it, only to be stopped by Mary, who touched Elsa’s gloved hand with her own. “You’re sure it’s enough?” she asked the lawyer. “To get everything? I want to break him, not just divorce him.”

“Mrs. Phillips,” the lawyer said with that pleased smile on his face, “with all your evidence, and now this? You’re going to clean him out. He’ll be lucky to leave the courtroom with the shirt on his back.”

Slowly Elsa picked up the pen and signed. Beside her Mary exhaled, as if releasing something that she had long held inside. At once, though, her sigh became a hacking cough. She hunched over in her chair, coughing and spluttering, waving away the lawyer’s offer of water; Elsa leaned over her and pressed a handkerchief into her hand.

“Thank you,” Mary muttered. She stayed hunched over, coughing into the handkerchief and dabbing at her eyes and face. At last she sat up and tucked the handkerchief into her purse, so only Elsa saw the black feather gummed to the cloth.

2.

Elsa slid the raw eggs into the pan, careful not to break the yolks. Bobby liked his eggs just so, he liked to eat all the white right up to the edges of the yellow circle, then cut a single small opening in which to dip his toast. He was like his father in this: the precision with his habits, wanting everything to be just right.

Elsa knew she was no longer just right; she was becoming less right with every passing week. Neither the doctor’s prescription nor her own lotions had done anything to stop the rash that now covered her from head to foot. She had tried vitamins, powders, baths with salts and baths with oils; still the bumps spread and swelled, some with white heads now, some with nearly black ones as well as brown. Her family believed she must have eaten something poisonous, she would have to be patient and let it work its way through her. When they said this Elsa had thought Mary, but kept her mouth shut.

Had Elsa’s mother still been alive she might have said something different. Her mother had often told her bedtime stories that weren’t in books, stories from the old world, stories her mother’s mother had told, and her mother before that, and so on … Stories of women who were changed into things, river rocks and fleet deer, nightingales and sparrows and tall, twisting trees. Always they were betrayed in some fashion and then swiftly changed, to save them from a worse fate. And then she was no more of this world, her mother would always finish, and then she would pretend to show Elsa something from the woman in question—a leaf, a feather. But such endings had never felt like escapes to Elsa. They felt like condemnations, and her dreams would be filled with monstrous images of animals with women’s faces, their silent mouths screaming endlessly.

Only now did Elsa understand her child-self had been right, that those stories weren’t fantasies. They were warnings.

She wasn’t escaping anything; she was being imprisoned in her own body. The bumps kept spreading, and her joints ached. Her fingers and toes curled when she rested, and her elbows were becoming stiff. What would happen if she became too sick, too strange-looking, to go outside? Who would help her, who would care for her?

She knew in her heart it would not be Robert, and she would not so burden her son.

As she arranged his food on the plate she looked at Bobby’s bowed head, and beside him her stony-gazed husband, still staring at the front of the newspaper like it was the world. Mary’s lawyer had called to discuss her statement—Elsa hadn’t expected anyone to call her, she had thought once she signed the paper it was over—and Robert had taken the call. His first rush of anger had been horrible but also a relief, she had spent so long anticipating it; what she had not anticipated was that he already believed her to have been unfaithful with Doug, and the statement merely confirmed what he had heard.

So much said in the days and nights since, that could not be unsaid.

She could only think of two people who might have told him such a thing, and only one who could have done so without getting punched.

She put the eggs before Bobby, kissed his head, and hurried back into the kitchen. The smell of her son in her nostrils. Robert slept on the sofa now, and only responded when she told him basic things: what was for dinner, who had phoned during the day. All the money was in his name, and if he started talking to a lawyer—? Only now did she see that her statement might work against her just as it had worked against Doug.

Even if she could afford a lawyer of her own it would get ugly quick, and she would have to relive it all. And Bobby … to put him through all that, what would it do to him?