The man in his robes stood behind her, with his wife in her wig behind him, with next his sickly girls. His cane was polished. He used it to bring Bird’s skirt up, thrust it between her legs. He tapped her once, tamped at her.
“Dirty goy,” he whispered.
Dirty, dirty Jew.
Bird bought a pregnancy test on her way home. She would bathe when she got home and wake Mickey. She would run a bath scalding hot and listen for birds in the airshaft — creaking dullards that stayed behind when all the singing pretties flew south. He would feed her cantaloupe in the bathtub how he used to. And she would tell him. She would show him the stick she had peed on — the watery bands of blue.
Part way home, Bird broke into a run and ran past their stoop and around the block — once, and twice again. She was limber then, her blood moving. She would kiss Mickey awake and tell him everything she knew.
But he was gone. For days he was gone, no note that said where.
The note in the kitchen said: Let me when I come home to you slowly unbraid your hair. Please please please please.
And in the bedroom: Please please please maybe marry me.
Bird sat on the bed waiting, the pregnancy stick in his coffee cup by the bedside for him to find. If an ambulance passed, she pedaled after it to be sure it wasn’t him.
It wasn’t him.
A week passed, two. It wasn’t him.
And then it was.
Contusions, concussion — they called Bird to come to the ER. Mickey had stepped onto an elevator that wasn’t there and fallen three floors down the airshaft. He was sobbing when she got there: the doctors had opened him up, he swore, and found nothing but sticks and leaves.
“You’ll be fine,” Bird said. “It’s all fine, you’ll see. We could marry. I will never use your comb.”
“We could what?” Mickey said, and Bird blurted it out — the news of the missing days: dirty Jew, cantaloupe, the stick she had left in his coffee cup, a baby, they were going to have a baby, how did that sound to him?
“It was dark where I fell,” he told her. “I didn’t know where I was. A day passed before anyone came. I didn’t know would the elevator start up and what would happen if it did. I didn’t like the pictures — what I looked like zapped, what I looked like crushed. I kept seeing you when you found me. I was bleeding. I kept moving away from my blood — it would conduct the charge, I decided. I’d be fried in a puddle of blood. Or I’d be saved, but when they hauled me up the cable to lift me out, I would pick up a fatal splinter, a strand worked loose from the braided steel that would sail through me like a spear thrown into the royal chamber of my heart. You’re in my royal chamber, Bird. But my head feels broken open. Every word feels like fire I speak.”
When they got back to their place from the hospital, the up-neighbors’ tub had fallen through. With it came diapers and droppings, a bloodied tampon, a gnawed-on bone, a poisoned rat as long as Bird’s arm with its eyes busted out of their sacks.
“That was lucky,” Mickey offered, serious.
He was armored in pharmaceuticals, resplendent in the sun. Untouchable.
“Try to touch me,” he said.
They hadn’t been crushed, after all, by any of it — not by a rising elevator, not by a falling tub. Mickey brightened for weeks with the luck of it. He rubbed Bird’s belly sweetly, speaking her mother’s name. She would jump horses, their girl, as her mother had. She would play violin on a riverbank. She would know to fill a tub when the ice storm came and lay in wood and sit tight. She’d have hobbies — stamps and woodcuts, earrings of feathers and beads.
“Little Caroline, little Caroline,” Mickey told her, “we will knit you a poncho each year. We will sleep out under the apple trees in spring when the blossoms blow down.”
The days grew colder still. They dragged the tub into the bedroom at last and used it like a barrel to burn in — sticks and leaves and coconut husks and books they had read, to keep warm.
It is cold where we are and quiet, Bird wrote.
We will have to wreck one another, she wrote.
I am happier than ever, Mother, she wrote.
And: I have never been so scared.
“You scared?”
“You?”
“Maybe.”
“No.”
Mickey pressed a pillow against her face.
“Don’t be scared, Bird. Do you want to die or live?”
When Mickey had healed enough to move again, before the Vicodin ran out, they rode bikes across the bridge in the drizzle to their dark bar on Avenue B. They were swacked before they got there and shaking with cold. In the warm, they drank and drank.
Bird knew better. The babies of drunks were lumpish. She knew better than a diet of White Castle and junk and Almond Joys. Sleep and greens, she knew, dark berries. You weren’t ever to kill a spider those months or walk through a silver web. She hung their mittens; she kept their hats up off the bed. She kept their shoes switched and sorted for luck how her mother always told her, with the left shoe in the right foot’s place, the right in the left, lined up. Little tricks — for slipping babies out past the gods.
But more than this, Bird worked to seem as Mickey mostly was: mostly she worked on forgetting she had a baby in her at all.
Their song was on repeat on the jukebox; the regulars sat their stools. It was warm inside, swampy almost — wet clothes and the heat of bodies. The bartender wore a shirt slashed across the back to let his tattoo show. An ampersand, the bartender’s tat. And is truer than but, they agreed. They drank whiskey and felt exalted. Bird’s flocked-around feeling had gone.
They pushed out of the bar and the spiderwebs, meaty-looking and clotted with dust, swung in the burst of wind.
The street was torn up. There were pipes stacked up on the sidewalk — spanking-new silver lengths of pipe big enough to creep in, light enough to roll. They crept into a pipe and lay flat — cramped twins, knotted up, minutes apart, their bodies the same size. The pipe hummed in the wind and sleet. Bird kissed Mickey and, on the count of three, they threw their weight to one side. Now they were rolling. It hurt — which was funny. To be stewed in the swampy heat of the bar and now thrash about in the cold and grit, the reverb bright and tinny — everything was funny. The pipe banged down off the sidewalk and onto Avenue B, easy enough, gaining speed. Whiskey made it fast and flashy. They bucked against one another, bloodied themselves on the ribs of the pipe. They saw a taxi whip past through the mouth of the pipe and streetlights, streetlights passing, an umbrella inside out. Mickey shouted something that sounded like Wa Lou Re. Which was funny. Dumbass kidstuff funny. A woozy, goofy feeling.
Worth it?
Naw. Maybe.
Worth a trip to the ER, worth a trip to the morgue?
Yeah. Owright. Maybe.
Wa Lou Re.
Now Bird could make him out. “Will you?”
“Yes.”
“Marry me?”
“Yes.”
“Will you marry me?”
“Yes, yes, yes.”
They had spent all their nickels on whiskey so they wriggled from the pipe and flagged down a cab and bolted on the fare when they got home. They were wet to the bone and happy — hoped to sleep so, wake so, keep it. They kept out of range at the back of their place, leaning into each other, kissing, until the cabbie whipped a stick at their window and peeled off down the street.