Out of the corner of her eye then, just breaching her peripheral vision, she spots a movement like a brush of premonition. Lamb’s orange form creeps past her, belly low, warbling and chirping — his gray eyes on the mynah.
The woman spots Lamb nearly at the same time and gets to her feet. “Hsst. Bad, bad!” She kicks in Lamb’s direction, the cat flattening but not retreating. The mynah releases a piercing awgh and lifts its black wings like a villain’s cape. Lamb freezes in mid-stalk, the bird puffs up larger, hopping forward, shrieking aawgh, aawgh! Certain her cat — which had once belonged to Felice — is about to be eviscerated, Avis bounds from her hiding place, fronds and leaves flying, into the neighbor’s yard and scoops up the tabby, simultaneously catching flashes of the flapping bird, the woman’s hand fanned at her throat. Avis hurries back through the leaves, across the yard, through the French doors, and tosses the cat so it yowls, midair, and falls on the couch.
Avis stands with her back to the French doors, shaking and out of breath. Slowly, she risks a glance and sees the woman has followed her through the palms and now stands in Avis’s yard. She is rigidly furious, arms akimbo, fists balled. “You are watching us!” the woman shouts, her voice elongated. Avis wavers in the door, her hand trembling on the frame. “I’m terribly sorry,” she mumbles. “I’d swear I’d pulled that door shut — they swell up in the rainy season…”
“Who are you, lady?” The woman is implacable. “What do you want?”
Avis takes a few meek steps outside. She clasps her hands at her waist. “Oh, I’m so — I was just — I was doing some — I was in my garden — and — I heard some voices. I heard you, I think — and I — and I—”
The woman’s eyes dart around the overgrown yard. She squints at Avis, chin forward. “How long you been watching me?”
Avis lowers her head. She feels breathless and woozy. “A while.”
“A while,” the woman says in her contrapuntal way. “A while, yes.” Something relaxes in the filament of the woman’s eyes. “You aren’t altogether in possession of yourself, are you?”
She looks different here, in another context. Avis sees she is very small — a good head shorter, possibly thirty pounds lighter than Avis. Her yellow dress, kerchief, and gold-beaded earrings glow as if absorbing energy from her body. The woman’s eyes tick over her, inventorying, then she turns her head slightly and backs away. She moves toward the palms, shoves them aside, and walks through.
THE NEXT MORNING, Avis draws a comb through her wet hair and the tines fill with strands. Under the bathroom light, she stares at her reflection; her skin looks depleted and she believes she can divine the round shape of her skull through the hair. A dermatologist had told her last month that her hair would quit falling eventually. Probably hormonal, she’d said, adding with the condescension of the young: Our bodies change. Her mother had warned that Avis would get fat from baking. Now Avis looks at her hard little wire of a smile: Geraldine had said nothing about going bald. Avis scoops her remaining hair in one hand, tilts the scissors in the other, and snaps away furiously. “Here you go!” she says to the mirror with a big smile. “Happy Birthday, Felice! Happy Birthday to you!” It takes just a few minutes to lop it all off, so what remains — about two to four inches — juts from her head in a tufted silver and brown corona. She pushes it back and tucks what she can behind her ears before tying a slim silk band around her hairline — loose hairs a disaster for baking. She sweeps the bathroom floor and wipes the sink, listening to the neighbor’s bird chatter in the other yard.
Avis returns to her desk, skin still humid from the shower, her left hand combing the blunt ends of her hair. With her right hand, she browses through the rest of the day’s orders: cinnamon palmiers; pistachio-cocoa 12-layer torte… She gazes at this order a moment, her pulse elevated, as if she’s been drinking too much coffee, and she begins jotting notes on a new pastry: For this cake, I want to mingle the womanly and masculine foods — sugars and meats in particular. The walls must come down. Must temper, must balance. Add the leeks to the chocolate, vanilla to the turnip. Tear away the sacred walls between the sweet and savory worlds. She stops and rereads what she’s written: what does it mean? Again she hears the mynah singing in the neighbor’s yard.
Avis lowers her head, runs her fingers into the new perimeter of her hair. She tries to think her way through this: the link between death and sugar. Stanley sends her nutrition newsletters with reports on diabetes and obesity. It seems to her that sugar is a metaphysical problem: each occasion of eating asserts its own needs. Her fingers wait on the keyboard as her vision glazes out the east windows, unfocused. All the glorious pastries of the world are baked and eaten and gone forever, and there is only the fiery moment of the now. Minds and bodies tell one story: I tasted; I loved; I was young. But the now burns everything in its oven. Her mother said that heaven was “the unattainable.” The mynah’s cry tears at the air, sailing over the trees and hedges and songbirds. She thinks: Perhaps the neighbor hates me because I work with sugar.
Suddenly it simply isn’t a choice: Avis feels she must explain herself to the neighbor — it’s unbearable that the woman might think Avis a fool or insane or not “in possession” of herself.
The grass feels hard against her bare feet and she pushes through the thicket of the palms, scraping her arms, the fronds like pastry knives. The bird in its cage becomes agitated when it sees her, and Avis nearly stops, startled by its keening. The sun is up, but the woman hasn’t come out yet. She taps, then raps her knuckles against the wood-framed screen door: the back door is open. “Hello in there!”
A shape emerges behind the dark screen. “Dieu.” Pure exasperation. She tilts open the door. “You are here again?”
Avis tries to smile, her lips tremble. “I brought you…” She holds out the white bakery box.
The neighbor steps outside and gives her a long look — less caustic than before, but still full of irony. Finally she says, in that contrapuntal accent, “So I am never going to be rid of you.”
Avis touches the lid of the box. “Do you like chocolate and hazelnut? They’re petits fours. They have a little layer of marzipan and a layer of meringue. Some berry.” As long as she stays focused on the box her voice is steady. “I wanted to apologize.”
“You did, did you.”
“I wanted—” Avis turns slightly, gestures toward the trees. “I was just peeking,” she says hopelessly.
“Yes, like a spy.”
“No, no, please. The — your bird was — singing — making its sounds. And I just came to see. I work at home. I’m a baker.” The woman’s face registers nothing. Avis soldiers on. “And I came — just to look. And you looked so pretty and the bird was so sweet with you, and so…” She trails off.
The woman’s obsidian eyes are pitiless. “How many times you watch me? More than one?”
Avis clears her throat lightly.
“Spying,” the woman says matter-of-factly. “Where I come from, you know what happens to spies?”
“Nothing good, I’m sure,” Avis mumbles.
Then she seems to think of something. “You know how long it took me to polish that tray? An hour and a half. Just to get it clean.”
Avis almost says: You’re not supposed to clean it. Instead she opens the box and offers it again. “Please. If you would accept these? It’s just something small.”
Finally the woman consents to look in the box. Avis can smell the sparkling fraise des bois essence. She sees a lilt, like sadness, in the woman’s face as she touches the box. “These are marzipan petits fours?” She lowers her face, inhaling. “The lady who owned the house where my mother worked — almost every day she ate these. This style. My mother smelled like these berries. Every day, the cook made twenty petits fours.”