The Bird Market of Paris Read online

  “You see,” Fitch said, “I have them all in line.”

  I pitied those kids. I imagined their terrified life with Uncle Fitch, and I was glad it wasn’t mine. Later, Fitch was sent to jail for attempted murder of the kids’ mother. He had shot at her with a rifle as she ran from him through the avocado grove, bullets hitting only trees. In my early twenties, my dad told me that Fitch had died homeless on a mattress in an abandoned building, an empty bottle of scotch and a bottle of painkillers near his head. I felt sad for him, but kind of relieved for the world.

  * * *

  Poppy hated the couch drunks. “That bloody sycamore,” he’d hiss under his breath when he encountered one of them. “Bloody sycamore” was Poppy’s favorite substitute curse phrase. He was as dry of expletives as he was of alcohol, at least in a language I understood; he cursed liberally in Arabic when someone cut him off on the road.

  He said to me, many times, finger pointing to the sky in a kind of oath, “Chérie, I never took a drink in my life.” He loathed taking pills, too, in practice and as a concept, and called people who took pills—even prescription pills—“pillographers.” He thought doctors were out to poison people.

  “Do you know the root of the word poison?” he’d ask. I’d shake my head, though he had told me the answer a million and one times. “Pharmakeia. Stemming from the Greek. In English, it is where we get the word pharmacy.”

  During my childhood, Poppy and I often spent Saturdays together at the Surf Club on Miami Beach, where Poppy played in an ongoing backgammon tournament. The Surf Club had a saltwater pool with a high diving board, and two tame capuchin monkeys who swung down from the banyan trees to snatch French fries from my plate. Poppy pointed out an old lady at the bar, an ancient, wrinkled socialite sitting by herself, head bobbing and teeth clenching, and whispered, “She took a lot of drinks, and look what happened to her.”

  He greeted the frail woman, called her mademoiselle and kissed her hand, and she blushed, batting her eyes at him from under thick, glossy fake eyelashes. Giant circles of rouge shone like identical orange suns on her weathered cheeks. When we walked away, he said, “Such a shame. Look what a drink can do.” We greeted that lady in the same way for years thereafter, having the same conversation about her as we walked toward the cabanas, until one day Poppy told me she had died.

  Nona and Poppy were at least three-times-a-week attendees of happy hours in North Miami Beach at any one of a rotation of six hotel or marina bars that served free food to catch the after-work crowd. They both collected Social Security and had drawers full of stolen pink Sweet’N Low packets and paper napkins. Poppy’s work had been glamorous, but not as lucrative as it might have looked, and he had a gambling habit, spending long days at the horse and dog tracks. At happy hour, buying one drink entitled Nona and Poppy access to a decent appetizer buffet that served as their dinner. One of the buffets had barbecue ribs and sushi; another had tacos and quesadillas; a third featured a prime rib carving station.

  One Friday we showed up at five p.m., few customers other than us in the hotel bar. Poppy, dressed all in white as usual, ushered us to a seat near the buffet.

  “Please bring us two Bloody Marys,” he told the waitress, indicating with a gesture that they were for himself and Nona, “With the vodka on the side. My little girl will have a soda.”

  The waitress appeared with two Bloody Marys, along with two elegant, stemmed shot glasses of vodka, and set them on the table.

  “If you order tomato juice,” Poppy said, pointing to the glasses, “it costs four dollars and seventy-five cents. If you order a Bloody Mary with vodka on the side at happy hour, it costs two dollars and seventy-five cents.”

  My soda was $3.50. I felt bad that I was too young to order the Bloody Mary with the vodka on the side because it would have saved him seventy-five cents.

  Poppy scanned the barroom and, when no one was looking, dumped the vodka shots into a plant behind him. That poor plant. I wondered if the vodka would kill it like it had killed the lady at the Surf Club.

  * * *

  Once, the couch drunks arrived as a couple, a man and his young wife. I overheard that they had moved into town and didn’t have a place to stay. I didn’t pay much attention to the history of our couch drunks and never asked questions. I didn’t want to live symbiotically with them.

  After a few nights and a few bottles of wine, the wife came into my room to play with my hamsters. She was pretty and a little chubby, with dark, platter-like eyes, and skin the color of doves. Her face brightened when she held the animals, baby-talking to them, asking me about their ages and what they liked to eat. She strolled the perimeter of my room, admiring my posters of horses, kittens, ducklings, and a shirtless John Stamos in tight leather pants.

  “I’m wearing a wig,” she said absently to a poster-size collage I had created from glossy pictures of horses cut from the pages of Horse Fancy magazine. The girl pulled on her dark, springy curls and turned to me. “This isn’t my real hair.”

  She sat on the mattress on the floor in the corner of my room. The fact that I didn’t have a real bed—one with a frame and a headboard—had traveled around school like a virus after a weekend sleepover, becoming taunting fodder for some of the mean girls, the same girls who called me “PYT” after the Michael Jackson song; instead of “pretty young thing,” they cut the Y, shortened it to “PT,” and changed the meaning to “prostitute.” I hadn’t even kissed a boy yet. My dad told me that a man’s penis had sharp black barbs that shot from all sides of it, like a porcupine, and if I touched a penis I would experience the worst pain in the world and I’d have to go to the emergency room to have a hand operation to remove the black barbs and he’d know I had touched a penis and I’d be in big trouble. This information made going anywhere near boys kind of prohibitive. I didn’t try to verify his claims, too embarrassed to ask anyone or open an anatomy book in the library.

  “Really? That’s not your hair?” I said to the couch drunk with the wig. “Can I see?”

  She peeled back part of the wig near her forehead, revealing hair lighter than the dark wig’s finger curls.

  “It looks real,” I said. “Why?”

  “The man I’m with … he’s not my husband,” she said. “He kidnapped me from my mother. She used to beat me and she put her cigarette out on my neck.” She swept back her wig hair to reveal a faint round scar in the hollow space between her clavicles. I couldn’t imagine how a cigarette burn could be that unnoticeable, but I nodded in commiseration anyway.

  “I’m thirteen,” she said. “We … go to bed, you know, but we didn’t for a long time. He didn’t force me or anything.”

  My mouth must have been agape. I was also thirteen.

  “He’s going to buy me two kittens. I want the kittens with six toes,” she said. She gazed at me with big, doleful eyes. “Nobody knows. Please don’t tell anyone. He’ll get mad.”

  “I won’t,” I told her. I felt violated, like it was me who had been kidnapped. Did her mother miss her? Was her family searching for her? How did she maneuver around the sharp black barbs shooting from the man’s penis? I didn’t want to ask.

  I guessed I was the only other person in the world, besides her and her kidnapper/husband, who knew their secret, and I knew I should tell someone, but a secret was sacred, and at thirteen, that precept was gospel. I felt sorry for the girl, but also envious. I’d seen her drinking with my parents and her kidnapper/husband, and once I knew her secret, I resented being sent to bed while they continued their party. I was sure my parents didn’t know about the couple’s charade. Many years later, I finally broke her confidence, and my parents said they’d had no idea she was anything but a young adult.

  I placed The Police’s Synchronicity album onto my record player and set the needle to “Every Breath You Take.” The girl and I sat together, silent, listening to Sting sing his haunting refrain: I’ll be watching you.

  Chapter 5

  The creature was nothing
but a pink curl, knobby on its sides, with silky, pearlescent yellow fluff rising from its back like vagrant weeds in an ill-tended garden. It slept hunched in the hollow of a few tissue papers. Its closed eyes were dark pebbles covered with the thinnest living tissue, arteries pulsing dangerously near the surface of its skin, red and blue highways on a trinket map. The hatchling looked barely contained within its membrane, as if the creature inside could spill out at will and rehatch itself into the world with one great push.

  Then one eye squeezed open, glassy and black. The eye seemed knowing. I had thought of the little pink curl as an object; now it was looking at me. Its head popped up and it uttered a rodent-esque squeak, very un-bird-like, then scrunched its head into its neck and shimmied deeper into the tissue paper, falling back asleep.

  Minutes before this creature found its way into my hands, I’d heard my boyfriend’s Toyota engine whine and then stop with a putter. Out the window, I saw my boyfriend, Peter, walking up the blacktop holding a red-and-silver heart-shaped Mylar balloon that trailed behind him in the wind. I was eighteen years old, and I’d never before had a boyfriend on Valentine’s Day. Peter, a student at Miami Dade Community College, where we both attended classes, had made dinner reservations for that night, but then called and asked to drop by a few hours earlier on his way home from work at the pet shop to give me something. In the hand not toting the end of the balloon’s string, he held a white coffee mug encircled with a pattern of red hearts.

  He thrust the mug at me in the open doorway.

  “Happy Valentine’s Day,” he said and gave me a kiss. I reached for the mug with both hands, as if he were handing me the Holy Grail, and peered into it.

  It definitely wasn’t jewelry.

  “It’s a baby lovebird.” Peter followed me inside. He let go of the balloon and it floated to the ceiling. “For Valentine’s Day.”

  “I can see that.” I cradled the mug in my hands. I hadn’t anticipated this, though it wasn’t beyond expectation that he’d give me a pet as a valentine.

  I inspected the little parrot sleeping in the mug. I already had my share of pets: a ten-gallon tank of fish, each one named; a fat rabbit I’d found cold and starving under a bush near a soccer field; a dozen Mexican hooded rats; a gerbil; a Florida box tortoise named Swifty; a cage full of prolific zebra finches; and four cats, three of which I’d brought home as kittens—Paisley, the tiny feral gray tabby I picked out of a dumpster; Gladys, the chocolate Burmese someone gave to my dad; Emmeline, the fluffy black and white mute; and Sylvester, a smart tuxedo kitty whom I’d trained to give his paw to shake when asked.

  The bird in the mug was plain and helpless, and I had the vague notion Peter had scored it for free. I stroked the creature with my index finger.

  “I love it,” I said, hoping he didn’t hear the tentativeness in my voice.

  Peter showed me how to heat the baby’s premade hand-feeding formula in a small cup in the microwave, and how to fill a needleless syringe with the formula and place it on the baby’s beak, which opened when touched. The bird’s little head pumped up and down as I compressed the plunger of the syringe and its crop filled, the mustard-colored food visible in a pouch through the translucent skin under its neck. It looked like a bullfrog in mating season. I placed the baby back into the coffee mug, and it promptly fell asleep.

  Peter drove away, leaving me alone with the little parrot and its Ziploc bag of supplies. What kind of person gives someone a Valentine’s gift she has to feed every four hours? I stared at the delicate baby in my lap and thought about a name. Opal might be nice, but a resentful name choice, too, since opal was my birthstone and it was Valentine’s Day, after all. I decided on Bonk, after a golden retriever in a movie I had recently seen. I sat on the sofa with Bonk’s mug warming between my thighs and watched him sleep. He had tiny black spots all over his back where feathers threatened to burst through. His head was shaped like the round part of a question mark, and his body like a less-than symbol, angular and tapered to a point where his tail would be if feathers had been growing there. He squirmed, then delivered a forced-sounding noise like “eeeaahhhkkkk,” followed by a loud, squirty poop.

  I decided I could like the little guy.

  * * *

  Bonk grew at a supersonic pace, like a strange Amazonian plant that sprouts a foot a day. He moved from the mug to a ten-gallon fish tank in a week. From one day to the next, the pepper-like black dots scattered on his skin burst through the thin tissue, forming pinfeathers that made him look like a pincushion with eyes. A few days later, an unnatural tropical green hue broke through the top of the pinfeathers. A shade of turquoise the ocean would envy covered his rump, and on his face, the slightest shade of pinkish peach emerged. His tail feathers unfurled from their sheathes in a combination of red, blue, black, and green. He loved when I scratched his head and face, helping him to preen away the waxy sheaths of the pinfeathers so the feathers could emerge.

  His lust for food was ardent, and he’d eat from the syringe until he fell asleep on his feet. He’d nap in the front of my shirt after eating, wrapped in a paper towel to catch the inevitable poop.

  “Look at that!” Poppy exclaimed when he met Bonk. “I am a great-grandfather! You are aging me, Chérie.”

  Poppy held Bonk in one hand and petted him gently with the other, and I felt proud to have graduated to my own parrot.

  “You are taking good care of him,” Poppy said. “I would like to have a bird like this.”

  “Isn’t he sweet?” I took Bonk from Poppy and cupped the baby in my hands.

  “He is as sweet as his mother.”

  When Bonk saw me, he bounced around as if I was the sun and moon of his little birdy life. As soon as he gained some mobility, he paced frenetically back and forth in his fish tank when I walked into a room, cheeping like an alarm clock, and ceased only when he gained my attention. The more he needed me, the more I fell in love with him.

  He’d cry and wail until I held his humid body in my hands; he’d ride on my shoulder while I did homework or chores. I’d watch television with him asleep under my chin, and I wouldn’t move if it meant I might wake him. I saw countless episodes of Alf and The Golden Girls I had not intended to watch.

  How could this animal be capable of such trust? I’d known birds as cautious creatures. Bonk preened me and cuddled me and argued with me when I did something he didn’t like, such as blow my nose. Tissues were offensive and had to be shredded, which he did while screaming with the verve of pumped-up troops running into battle.

  The African peach-faced lovebird, Bonk’s species, is a member of the Agapornis genus, whose name stems from the Greek word agape, meaning “love.” Ornis means “bird.” The field scientist who named these little parrots couldn’t have been more accurate. Bonk exuded love from every cell of his birdy body.

  At three months old, he was feathered and mobile, running after me wherever I went. He was supposed to be off the hand-feeding formula by then, but I’d never hand-fed a baby bird before, and I indulged his relentless begging. He squalled and bobbed up and down like an oil derrick on speed, and I couldn’t do anything until I fed him. He ate formula for six months, way longer than he should have, and became big and bright and attached to me like a rivet, an obsessive kind of friendship that wasn’t one-sided.

  * * *

  My parents and I moved to a sunny house on the water in a section of Miami called King’s Bay, south of Kendall and north of Homestead, an outcropping of postwar houses on streets lined with old shade trees. My dad wanted a home with a dock and easy access to good fishing spots in the bay. The back of our house opened onto a wide canal leading to the sea on one end and, on the other, to a boat basin where homes had large yachts tied to their docks. It was the perfect house for Bonk. I could sit outside with him in the sun and ocean breeze, or under the sea grape tree for shade, and he had his own little room off the kitchen, the “bird room,” where he could hop around without concern of becoming lost or injured.


  I referred to Bonk as “my little son.” He spent most of his days on my shoulder, perched under my hair, sleeping or quibbling with the tag on the back of my shirt. He attended college classes with me at Miami Dade, enjoyed keg parties with Peter and his frat guy friends, shopped at the mall, went to the monthly meeting of the Florida chapter of the Cockatiel and African Lovebird Society, and tagged along on my dates with Peter, unnoticed underneath my long hair until he decided to chirrup. He learned to click and whistle, and greeted me every day with a resounding catcall.

  I took Bonk with me whenever I spent the night with Nona and Poppy. The sun clocked out as Nona cooked fish stew and okra in tomato sauce, and served us hummus and olives, and pita bread straight from her oven. Poppy and I rested in squeaky patio chairs, feet up on a plastic patio table, watching his Lady Gouldian and zebra finches—and Bonk, the little bird excited by dusk after a day of napping in the heat. Poppy loved when Bonk drank water: the way the bird dipped his beak into the bowl, then tilted his head back so the water rolled down his throat. Poppy pointed to Bonk as he drank so I wouldn’t miss it, and peeled cucumbers and boiled eggs for Bonk so he had something soft and nutritious to eat.

  Bonk ate at the dinner table with me every night and shared my food in the cafeteria on campus, jumping into the meal, his reptilian feet leaving gravy tracks on the table. He had issues with silverware, and ran between place settings to toss the spoons, forks, and knives onto the floor. It was difficult to keep him out of drinking glasses. He’d bathe standing on the edge of the glass, spraying water like a dog shaking off a swim. I had to give him a shallow water glass of his own or he’d bathe in my orange soda.

  “Please do not kiss the bird on the mouth, Chérie,” Poppy said, catching me allowing Bonk to clean my teeth one day, his feet perched on my bottom lip and the front half of his body all the way inside my mouth, picking at my molars. Bonk was a good and gentle dentist.