Rare Birds: Stories

Rare Birds, 1959-3

Could she bear to let her son go?

She began washing the pan, watching her reddened hands in the water as she scrubbed, her knuckles flexing white with the effort—

—and then stared, open-mouthed, at the line of erupting bumps along her hand and forearm. Small brown tubes jutted out from her irritated skin, their tufted ends waving like tiny ferns in the water. She raised her hands, turning them one way and another, and then ran a soapy finger along the lines of feathers, marveling at their plastic feel, at how the tufts were already drying and softening.

Only then did the enormity of it hit her. She pulled at a feather, trying to remove it, but the pain was swift and shocking: it was in her, it was part of her. Still she raised her hand to her mouth and bit down hard on the shaft, wrenching and pulling until at last it came free. At once the wound began to bleed, not the bleeding of a normal scratch or scrape but freely, copiously bleeding, splattering red across the countertops and sink, dyeing the dishwater pink as she fumbled for a clean towel and pressed it to the wound.

Elsa bent low over the sink then, swallowing her sobs so Robert and Bobby would not hear, for she understood, at last, how everything she had ever imagined about her life to come had been lost the moment the first bump appeared.

She had expected another apartment like her own, a tiny, cramped space among dozens like it, but as she made her way to Mary’s address it was as if she had crossed into another world. Here were large, sprawling Tudor cottages, with actual lawns and pruned shrubbery; here were flowers, spilling from pots and twining their way around railings. Elsa had never known the neighborhood existed. Even the city noise seemed muffled, as if she had passed through some kind of bubble to reach this place.

She found the house and was again surprised: it was one of the largest, with gabled windows and a quaint little turret. It was something that belonged in a wealthy suburb, not here.

It was all my money. How much money did Mary actually have? Until now Elsa had been debating her approach, because she hadn’t believed, couldn’t believe, that Mary would utter such a lie, and to Robert no less. But this storybook house, the pristine lawn and the lace curtains and the driveway, that she actually had a car—oh, it made something grow hot and tight in Elsa’s stomach, made her hands into fists so that she had to punch the doorbell with a reddened knuckle.

When the door swung open she pushed her way in before Mary could protest, storming into the silent, pristine living room and rounding on her. “What did you say to Robert?”

Mary shut the door and locked it.

“He’s filing for divorce, Mary. He’s filing for sole custody.” She was trembling with anger. “You said nothing would happen. No trials, no police, just make a statement. You got what you wanted. Why did you do this?”

Mary looked at her levelly, then angled her head. “Drink?”

“Damn you, answer me,” Elsa ground out. Her own tears were blinding her; she wiped at her eyes with the back of her hand, only to yelp as the tip of a feather poked her.

“Well, I’m going to have one.” Mary went to the little cart in the living room; in the silence there was only the sound of Elsa’s shuddering breath and ice clinking against glass. At last Mary said, “I didn’t intend to say anything to Robert. He came up to me in the playground the other day, my son was standing right there. What was I supposed to say in front of him?” She downed two fingers of Scotch and poured another. “They’ve been teasing him at school, saying things about Doug … so I thought, there’s no reason for him to know the truth about his father, not now. So, I told him and a few of the other mothers … I said it was an affair, I just meant to soften it a little. And then all of a sudden Robert was there, I mean he came to my son’s school for God’s sake, and all those snoops were listening to us, waiting to catch me out.” She suddenly rounded on Elsa. “What would you have me say?” she yelled.

“The truth,” Elsa yelled back. “The goddamn truth! What about my boy? Robert’s taking him away, Mary, he says I can’t be trusted!”

Mary took another long sip. “You know,” she said in a normal tone of voice, “I think I did you a favor.”

The words brought Elsa up short. “What?”

“You heard me. I did you a favor.” She took a step closer to Elsa, her eyes narrowing. “I think you didn’t want to tell him because you knew, deep down, that he would never believe you. What kind of husband believes a stranger over the woman he supposedly loves? What kind of husband lets the mother of his son go to work each day looking like a slut?” She finished the second drink and wiped her mouth on her sleeve. “And then he comes to me—to me—asking if there was any funny business between you and Doug? In public? In front of my son? I don’t think he gives a damn about you. I think you’re just a thing to him, like a car, and you’re just not running right anymore.”

With a cry Elsa flung herself forward, hitting Mary as hard as she could; they tumbled onto the carpet. She pushed herself up to sitting and brought her fist down, once and again, trying to beat away the smirk on Mary’s face.

On the third blow, there was a cracking noise; Elsa froze, her hand raised. Behind the blood and the bruising weal on Mary’s nose was something else, something black and shell-like. She looked at the hint of beak, then at the blood on her own spotted knuckles, and sat back with a whimper.

“Maybe we deserve this,” she whispered. “Maybe it’s a curse, we brought it on ourselves, all this deceit and ugliness …” Her eyes were running, running. “God, why didn’t I just tell him that night …”

“Because he’s a man,” Mary said, her voice garbled; she rolled her head to the side and spat blood, then propped herself up on her elbows. “Because you know that no matter how you explained it, he’d never touch you again. Not after that.” She made a cutting gesture with her hand. “We’re changing because of men, Elsa. All the gods are men. All the doctors are men. All the cops and the judges and the shrinks are men. If Doug had done that to a man they would have hung him from the nearest lamppost; if a man suddenly started spouting feathers they’d have a cure within a year or worship him like he was the goddamn Second Coming. Us? Oh, we’re hysterical, we’re crazy, we can’t be trusted … and when we try to say no, this is what we get.” She staggered to her feet, touching her nose gingerly. “If you ask me, this is just an allergic reaction to all the men in our lives.”

The furious outpouring made Elsa cringe, but not as much as it would have, once. “You shouldn’t speak like that,” she said to the carpet. “You should think of your boy—”

“My son hates me,” Mary said flatly. “Thinks I drove his daddy away.” She tapped the black spot with her fingernail, wincing at the clicking sound. “He told me the other night either I let him live with Doug or he’s going to leave the day he turns eighteen and never see me again. He’s started getting into fights at school … now I have to decide whether I want to raise a delinquent, or let Doug raise a monster.”

She went over to the cart and poured two more Scotches; when she held one out Elsa got to her feet and took it. The amber liquid burned her throat. Robert never let her have liquor …

But Robert wasn’t around anymore. Robert would probably never be around again.

“You always think you’re different,” Mary said, her back to her Elsa. “You get married and you see other women’s husbands and you think, not me, my guy won’t ever go around chasing skirt like that. You have a son and you think, not my boy, he’ll never go bad, he’ll never be disrespectful or cruel like those other kids.” She looked at Elsa and her eyes were red. “My son is going to leave me all alone like this!”

She shoved her sleeve up to her elbow, revealing lines of molting feathers, small and fine like new blades of grass.

Elsa stared at her. “And what happens to him if he stays? How will you take him to school, looking like that? The doctor? A baseball game? Maybe it’s not a choice between a delinquent or a monster. Maybe it’s a choice between some kind of normal or, or whatever this is.”

She raised her hand to point at Mary’s face, but found she could not straighten her finger completely; the knuckle simply would not yield. Her crooked hand hung in midair, spotted with down, and Elsa understood then she was speaking not to Mary but to herself, that a door was closing in her own heart.

When she returned home the apartment was dim and quiet. There were a last few boxes of Robert’s things by the door; the bedroom suddenly seemed large without Bobby’s narrow cot against the wall. The silence pressed in on her, it made her skin crawl, and with a racing heart she hurried into the living room and turned on the radio. The familiar orchestration, the first crooning words, they all soothed her:

And now the purple dusk of twilight time

Steals across the meadows of my heart

She moved around the room, turning on lamps, smoothing down her hair as she prised off her hat and coat. Her whole body was tense; she realized she was listening for footsteps in the hall because she hadn’t made any dinner, and what would Robert say if he came home and there was no dinner waiting?