“That’s enough,” Bird tells her.
“Oh it isn’t. I keep you posted. Early girl news. He moved.”
Moved, moved again. He thought to marry. He’d marry another, think of that, just as Bird had.
“He’ll never marry,” Suzie says, “he’s like me. She would have to swear to die in three months’ time of an incommunicable disease. I don’t care who — Raquel, Ruby Lou, Victorine. He’s like me.”
Suzie lives among the samplings. The saplings, and the fathery men. Men and boys and girls. Ship to shore; hand to mouth; bed to bed. Not for her: the leaky tit, the pilly slipper. The dread of the phone that rings in the dark: It’s your turn next to suffer.
“You hear nothing,” Suzie claims, “you can’t stand to, not a whiff of the world, a radio show. You cringe at the least of the news.”
Which is true. And the rest of what Suzie says? This much is true, too — that the feeling is forever gone from Bird, god willing: of disappearing, of ever again being alone. Lonely doll.
“Remember,” Suzie insists, “the sentence you get to finish? The dream you’re not wrangled from?”
The next first kiss to fall into.
“The old looseness, come on, you must miss it. You miss it. Your brain makes a drug to subdue you is all. Look, I see it. Suzie sees it. Those babies are everywhere at you, needing anything they find. Your every living tissue, sugar, is pressed into service — gone.”
Bird makes her slow laps as she listens — kitchen, woodstove, dripping milk, her shirtfront sopped, stewed in sour juices. She holds the phone out away from her ear: Suzie’s on a tear. It’s a club, Suzie claims, and she’s not in it, thanks. No, no thank you, honest, she’s not signing up to stew. Talky, stewy mother-club, virtuous, how little sleep and still she — look at her! — still she’s cheerful. Seems to be, look at her, cheerful. Or maybe she’s just smug, Suzie says. Clubby, you know, needed, every last speck of the day. Mama near. Little wife. A little respite comes, a little breath: nobody needs her! But she can’t quite believe it, or let herself step outside.
“When’s the last you stepped outside?” Suzie asks.
Or: “When’d you last look at your backside? That’s the flapping you feel when you walk, sugar. You need to walk, sugar. You need to move.”
He moved to France. Moved to pecan country.
Wise boy, getting out, flee the season. Winter coming on.
Oh I could help, Bird thinks, at least she thought it then. Pecan country. Pecans, best little nut. She could toss her smelly boots out, toss her stinking hat. Lie among the trees, among the shadows. She would like that. Watch the tough nuts fall.
She thinks of a boy in Kansas hung up on a swing, cripple boy, a boy they saw once, a little rope swing, a log on a rope, among the shadows. Among the signs. She and Mickey drove a Drive Away out, setting out from Brooklyn, dark, when the stars lined up how they sometimes do and anything you look at, everything’s a sign. SLEEP SLEEP SLEEP, the sign says. It says, Move while you still can.
The dog was dead, the ragtop towed. The up-neighbors tub had fallen through. A rat sprung a trap and came at them, hissing, its haunches caught, dragging the thing down the hall. Glory days. Dirty dark-bar days. A mouse ran up Bird’s sleeve and nipped her.
Her mother came to her in dreams. She was dead but in dreams, she lived.
I smell fire, she said, your toilet froze. I made you my nice kitten soup.
Her mother set a bowl down before Bird. The kittens simmered there, plump, unfurred — her mother always plucked them first, their bodies small as peas.
Her mother sang — the tune of the plastic shopping bag the wind had hung from a tree. Old winter wind. Old mother dead. Mickey slept and slept. Bird carried his child, tiny yet; they called it Caroline, little Caroline, which had been her mother’s name.
Bird wrote notes to her mother then, in the months she lived in Brooklyn, as though her mother were still alive. She wrote: I dreamed all the dogs I ever loved were running laps through the leaves around our house.
She wrote: I met a boy named Mickey. I crossed the room with my shoe off, my spiky heel, and knocked him between the eyes.
He hooks his finger in my ear to kiss me.
He sleeps with his eyes open.
We call the baby Caroline, she wrote. Sometimes Mickey calls me Caroline. I cut my hair like your hair. I still have all your dresses.
She wrote: His eyes are nearly white, Mother. It must be you love him, too.
Bird is wearing her mother’s robe even now, swabbing the sink, her shoulder hiked up to hold the phone. The house is quiet; the wind has quit. Everyone else is still sleeping. Even the dog is sleeping, stretched out on her side beside the woodstove, twitching through her dreams. Bird dog, Bird’s dog, demoted the moment her firstborn was born.
The house is quiet, that is, but for Suzie. Suzie won’t let her go.
“Hold on,” Suzie says. “Don’t go,” and sets the phone down, and walks off to snort whatever she snorts these days in a room where Bird can’t hear.
“Suzie,” Bird says. “I hear you. I’ve known you for a thousand years.”
The phone heats up, feels wet against Bird’s ear — that’s the burned-off waste of Suzie talking, Bird thinks. She’s back from Fiji, Machu Picchu, back from Timbuktu. Patagonia, Rapid City, Ngorongoro.
“Ngogn was my boy’s first word,” Bird says, slides the word in edgewise.
Suzie doesn’t miss a beat. She took a picture, she says, scuba diving. They were in a big pod of killer whales and the picture she took was black.
“I don’t get it,” Bird says.
“Black!” Suzie says. “As in solid? As in that’s how close they came?”
“They’re the only whale that will leave the water—”
“Yeah no, I know it. I saw, sugar. This one had a seal it snagged from the beach and bumped into the air like a kitten.”
Kitten is a name for Bird’s baby.
Ngogn is a word for dog.
“I’ll let you go,” Bird insists, and takes the first stair.
But something in her gives way.
“Bird?”
She has let a sound out. It is the sound of a woman run through. Harpooned, she thinks, fructifying bolt—right through the bony floor.
“Hurts,” she says. “Hold it.”
First stair. Seventeen to go.
Suzie’s been up Cotopaxi, Aconcagua, Mt. McKinley, Rainier. Stuffed her foot through the sinking snows of the fabled Kilimanjaro.
“You going to make it?” Suzie says.
“I’m dying.”
“You’re killing yourself.”
“I’m called.”
“Every beat of the fucking day,” Suzie says.
“So you said,” Bird says, and they are finished, having come back around.
Bird hangs up and sits on the stairs still talking, wondering if it might be true. She might be dying, that is, or only making it up. There is a code she doesn’t know, she thinks there must be, a sneaky, menacing tally. She lost seven teeth when she was pregnant — her gums withered, the yellow roots let go. She swallowed a tooth in her sleep one night and thought she had swallowed the baby, thought: I will have to give birth through my head.
“Like Zeus,” said her husband, teasing, “weird god of the fructifying bolt,” and walked out into the world.