In the city, Darla had been all mine (devotionally, not propertywise). She crunched budgets for young designers and had support groups to go to, and I had gallery representation, and site-specific commissions that would prop me up for months at a clip. Darla would surprise me with Zuni animal carvings bought from this Native American folk art boutique; I could easily find pancetta and cook us carbonara. In early spring, songbirds made nests in the tiny trees that grew in plots along the sidewalk. You would not believe how beautiful our life was, among the throng, insignificant. Strangers there didn’t smile like maniacs, or stop you to remark on something pretty, or ask who “your people” were. They were simply mean or indifferent. Yes, the city drove Darla and me together, against the jerks.
I have found no job since my nasty split with the town’s Oriental rug shop. A few weeks ago, I was passed over for a window dresser position at a women’s boutique on the square. Though demoralized, I decided that the right opportunity would find me if I just held out, just held on. I shared this optimism with Darla when she got home from work. She tore her navy blazer off, said, “Gee, man, it must be tough having tons of time and no expectation. Thank god we can’t have children.” She then laughed at her own sorry situation, infertility being one perk of her illness.
Once a month we drive up to Memphis to pick up her regiment of pills, and to try and feel decent and anonymous for a few hours. There’s a downtown garage called Parking Can Be Fun, and we park there, and it’s not really fun, but just a normal city parking garage, bored attendants and tire squeals, the stairwells foul with piss. We park and pay and walk out into the bustle, and smell the dank Mississippi River, and maybe get overpriced Thai. It’s lovely, this escape, façade, this dialogue with our first “term,” which is what Darla calls our first four years together, in the city.
At the Walgreens here in town the pharmacists grin and say, Hey, y’all, and then whisper about us afterwards. On the town square or at Kroger’s the residents smile as they sidestep us, pulling their kids in tight.
DARLA jostled, and the bird began pacing toward her head. It stared downward while doing so, like a philosopher. Helpless, I began to blame Dim.
We found that cat as kitten, in the city, beneath a ’91 Toyota Celica in Chinatown. It was February, and an icy rain pocked the streetside mounds of snow. I had just stepped into a pothole of slush. My right foot was in shock, my Italian boots ruined. And Darla and I stood there, freezing, yelling at each other because she was immune to my complaints. In lieu of empathy, she mocked my fortitude and my manhood in her greedy slog for Peking duck; she screamed in that displaced southern drawl of hers until she was out of breath — at which point we heard this little Graaaak beneath the shred of sleet off of passing cars. Graaaak, we heard it again, and we figured it was a sickly bird, and we bent down and there was Dim, frail and drenched and hunched over her paws, the size of a bun under the rusty Celica.
For the record, I was the one who wriggled under the car. (Also for the record, I wanted to name the cat ’91 Toyota Celica.) Dim wants birds enough to bash out all of our window screens, but has no idea how to catch them. She springs when she should creep, yards away from anything. No doubt this is due to lack of kittenhood instruction or support — which I’m sure is also my fault.
THE grackle poked its beak into Darla’s jumbled sleep hair. This was too much. I punched it in the face. It half cawed while slamming against the underwear drawer of our oak dresser, then fell to the floor. Darla shot up.
“What the? Honey, wha?” she asked, her fingers fanning her hair. “You okay?”
“There’s a bird,” I said, pumped.
“Where’s Dim? Who bird?”
I pointed to the foot of the bed and we crept there. Peered over the footboard and saw it askew on the floor. Its good eye was half open.
“It targeted you,” I said.
For a beat, Darla’s face betrayed a soft look of fear. This was one of the looks I’d fallen in love with, six-ish years ago, when we were just friends of friends who’d never thought to fix us up. When Darla was provocative and brash, but still emotionally frail, her giddyup dynamism a smokescreen for the belief that nobody could fall in love with a terminal infection.
But I could, and I did. And seeing this look, this Early Darla worry, I couldn’t help but clasp her wrist, smile, and nod to assure her. I’m here, I thought. And I’m not going anywhere.
“What have you done?” she asked, pulling free.
“Done, nothing. There was an eyeless bird on your back.”
“Bull-shit, man,” she said, naked except for striped panties. “I see its eye right here.”
“Yes, but. . but what would you want me to do, Dar?”
“Well, for one don’t murder anything!”
“It pecked your head! It was awful, like those beast-walking birds on Animal Planet. On the. . veldt!”
She reached into her mussed hair, confused, perhaps relieved — until the bird blinked.
“For heaven’s sake,” she said. “It’s a bird.”
“Grackle.”
“Whatever. Where’s the cat?” She got out of bed. Those striped panties of hers had a cute little sag in the bottom.
“Dim must be out,” I said. “To let this happen to you.”
“Out? Jesus, man, I’ll find the stupid cat.” She marched toward the den. “You take care of that bird.”
I shut my eyes and sought power, then reached to stroke the bird’s mangled wing.
“Please,” I whispered. Its beak parted when I touched it. I blew on it and it blinked. “Please die, bird. Die before Darla gets back.”
BEFORE all of everything there was Darla and her Greek Revival mansion. She’s a Mississippi native, which is why she took up the offer from her folks to move us back down here after the city got too exhausting. When the energy it took to navigate choked the energy it provided, and, according to her homeopathic hippie nurse, kept Darla’s viral load jacked up. Yes, we moved to this self-styled arts town, which we’d seen showcased in the city paper’s Sunday magazine, written up as “quaint” and “affordable,” and which had made her homesick. She promised the place would be to my surprise, that I’d have space and time and money to make my art. That it was warm, and that the people were extremely friendly.
And it is and they are — always.
Though I’ve yet to visit her parents’ home outside Jackson, Darla once told me (over much wine) that her mother, called Miss Sally, keeps a room full of dead babies. That Miss Sally’s got somebody inside the women’s clinic, the last one open in Mississippi, and that every time a woman aborts, this spy-nurse gives her an eight-by-ten of the pre-procedure ultrasound. Darla said every inch of wall and counter and end table space in their upstairs study is covered with X-ray babies; she said it’s Zygote City, that the images are in silver frames her mom snaps up from Stein Mart and Marshalls.
Miss Sally had each frame professionally engraved, until it got crazy expensive. Now she goes to PetSmart and has the instant engraving machine print the date of procedure, the names she gives the babies, and a fit-able version of the God talking to Jeremiah quote—I knew U B4 I knew U—etched onto twilight-blue dog tags that can be super-glued onto the frames.
When Darla was growing up, her mother made her tour the shrine every Sunday after church. Miss Sally had her read the names and dates aloud, then explain to all why the world had treated them so poorly, and how things had gotten so bad.