I tried to support the birds. A hobby is good for the mind. Then he’d brought in the fosters.
Apparently, Norwiches aren’t good at raising their own young. He takes their eggs as soon as they’re laid, and puts them in warm little drawers. He marks the date on a calendar. He has several different pens for writing on his big chart; they squeak when they write. He has “lizards” (birds so called for their markings) and fifes in cages apart from the Norwiches. He gives them the eggs, and they parent the new birds. I think that’s disgusting. Why fawn over a breed so unsuited to the fundamental functions of life?
I don’t enter the bird room anymore.
I was sure Miranda would feel the same about it. How could any mother not? How could any daughter not? He would go on about shape and feathers; how he’d successfully campaigned to make the standard rounder. He’d go on. Miranda would mark time, those fosters impossible to ignore. The “singing” is overwhelming. It comes from all sides.
Perhaps I ought to rescue her, I thought. Woman to woman. Give her a break.
The noise was indistinct, and strange. Wood smacking a wall. Was Harry building something? I couldn’t hear the bird room from my study. I was underneath a guest bedroom.
Its bed has a wide wooden headboard, up against a plaster wall. The joints must be loose. It exaggerated every movement on it, thumping like a timpani.
People feel sorry for me, not being able to see, but very little in the world is exclusively visual. This rhythm didn’t need looking at to know what it was.
There’s nothing profound that uses just one sense. There’s nothing that can hide itself by just holding up a curtain. Everything real has scent and sound and makes the air move differently. Real things shake. Real things loom. Being blind is bloody useless. For all its inconvenience I ought to be able to miss this. I ought to be able to not know, to walk by, to not see him on her. Everything I “see” is in my mind anyway. This is as vivid as if they were in front of me. This is in my mind, made of pieces of Harry I know from my own hands, and made up of envy of Miranda, who in my imagination is younger than she could be with Polly for a daughter.
The last time Harry reached for me was the day I sent Nick away. He came home just after Nick left. It was my birthday. Harry had bought flowers in the market. I smelled juice on his breath. Grocery bags crumpled at his feet. He leaned close to me but I put my hand up between us. I was still reeling from Nick. I’d remembered something. I used to have a trinket, a key chain I think. It had a lion on it. Someone had given it to me as a toy when I was very, very young. Children like lions, but that wasn’t why. They’d given it to me because I was a Leo. I suddenly remembered that. Someone, some friend of the family, giving it to me and telling me why. Because I’d been born in August. But I wasn’t born in August. My birthday is in December, my birthday was that day. My mother used to make an extra fuss to ensure I wouldn’t feel dwarfed by Christmas. But I remembered that lion. Harry put his face to mine but all I could see was an enamel painted lion head dangling from a cheap chain. I pulled back from him, from both heads, his and the lion’s. I’d said, “Liv’s upstairs,” to make him stop trying, even though she’d left before Nick.
Upstairs now, the thunk-thunk-thunk of the headboard hitting the wall continued. Miranda cried out. Then Harry too. “Oh!” he said, like he does. Like it’s taken him by surprise. The hum of pillow talk, he more than she. I couldn’t make out the words themselves but their content was predictable. Excuses. Explanations. Harry got out of bed, the squeaking, loose-jointed bed. His robe wouldn’t be there; his robe hangs on the post in our bedroom, not this one. He’d reach, then remember, and rise with his bottom bare.
Pull up trousers. Zip and belt. The bathroom is en suite. Miranda with a few minutes of privacy: Find clothes, straighten the bedspread. That’s the bed his mother sleeps in when she visits. That’s the bed his nephew used when he came last year to interview for the engineering department.
He came downstairs. I heard the door of the guest room open and close, then the whooshing sound through our pipes; she was in the bathroom, then. She came down the stairs too, her steps clicking on the wood. Neither had showered. They would still smell like what they’d just done.
I could hear the words once they were downstairs, she first: “I, I’m sorry. I shouldn’t have-”
“Shhh,” he comforted her.
“I didn’t mean to. I’ve been lonely. This whole… Polly doesn’t want me here. But I need to be away from home as much as she does. Her father, he-I’m divorcing him, of course. Not that I-I don’t mean that I’m trying to… You’re married. I know. I’m not trying to impinge on that. I’m not looking for something-commitment… I sound like a slut. A slag, you’d say, right? I remember that. My mother once called me a slag.” She laughed, high-pitched. They were ten feet from the door of my study.
“You’re not a slag. I shouldn’t have taken advantage.”
“It’s just… Sometimes I feel like right now is just this thing all by itself. I know that life is a… a chain… that moments are all in some kind of line and they connect and they affect each other. But sometimes I can’t feel that. I only feel now, just now, and that’s all there is. And… it was good, just now. I’ve done something terrible, but it felt good. There must be something very wrong with me.”
“It’s all right,” he said, “for two lonely people to comfort each other.”
“Thank you for that,” she said. “Sometimes I think I’m the only lonely person. But I know that’s not true.” Then “No.” As if he’d leaned in to kiss her. “I have to go,” she said. The usual kerfuffle followed: footsteps, coat, where did she put down her bag when she came in?
At the door, he said, “Miranda, today was good. It was good.”
“I don’t think Gretchen would think so-”
“Gretchen doesn’t care,” he said firmly. He said it loudly. “She hasn’t for some time.”
“Oh, I-”
“No, I don’t mean… I don’t make a habit of… This isn’t something I’ve done before. I don’t mean that she would know or approve. I mean she literally doesn’t care. About anyone. Certainly not about me.”
I pictured her hand on the doorknob, ready to flee his change from gallant to vulnerable.
Indistinct murmurs at the door. The bells attached to the door jangled for the open, then for the shut. There was quiet, then his footsteps back across the rug, then up the stairs. Our shower rattles the whole plumbing system. He stayed under the spray for what seemed like a very long time.
I’d been so relieved to get married the first time. The day after university graduation, one of my lecturers asked me out. He said he’d been waiting a long time to be able to do that. I admired his self-control. We dated for a year, then got married. I’d been happy to get that done, as advised in one of my favourite poems, by Adrienne Simms:
What is it that I grieve for when I weep,
when I leave my hair untidy, lank and long,
when my clothes are unrefreshed by wash or brush,
when I thrust the curtains shut though day is young,
when my every former joy before me palls
and I stay inside of doors, inside of walls
where torrid tears escape my eyes in squalls?
What is it that I miss now that you’ve left
no half-remembered hope behind unpacked
now that you’ve taken with you much of me,
which of those things are they which I most lack?