Fowl Weather (11 page)

I raised my face from my stir-fry. “We're not using him for anything anymore, are we?”

Linda shook her head. “But I think we should send the poor guy twenty dollars. Just for doing the test.”

I
WANDERED INTO
the backyard in more of a mental fog than usual. Instead of giving the chickadees that hung acrobatically from the bird feeder the attention they deserved, I watched an epic internal newsreel about my mom, worrying what would happen to her in the absence of my father's stabilizing presence. Trying to deal with all these brand-new concerns, I had begun feeling like a duck out of water myself. The door of the girls' pen was cracked open and a body sat on Linda's green plastic chair. Through the curtain of preoccupation, I did a zombie-stagger down the hill and called listlessly, “Hi, sweetie.”

Kate's face flashed me a frown; then she laughed. “Your wife said it was okay.”

I caught myself blushing. “Sorry. I was talking to a goose.”

She cradled Lulu in her arms. “He didn't seem to recognize me at first. Did you, Louie-Lou?”

I was embarrassed again as I noted that Lulu's blanket, bear, and mirror were wet and covered with dirt. “She's been a little confused, but I think she'll do okay,” I said, though I had strong doubts about the duck's progress. Kate nodded.

“Did you take the day off from work?” I blurted out without weighing the intrusiveness of my question. “I only work mornings,” I added hastily. “Unless you count what I do here as work.”

“I'm an attorney with a realty company, and the nonlawyers are at a seminar,” Kate answered. For a flash, I could see her as a lawyer—she did have a sharp-boned, intelligent face—but Lulu's nervousness distracted me. The duck quacked and made a move to hop off Kate's lap. Kate covered the duck's head with one hand and petted her back with the other.

Although Kate continued talking about her job, I missed the meaning behind the words and concentrated on the sound of her voice instead. Her nasal twang reminded me of the convenience-store worker who had wished me good morning a few minutes ago through the speaker on the gas pump as I filled my car. I knew the circuit worked both ways, but I hadn't yet reached the point in my life where I was comfortable answering a gas pump's greeting. I also had a difficult time separating Kate from Eileen's foolishness, which wasn't exactly fair on my part. But she had hidden a large white duck in an apartment bathroom.

“She's having a hard time, isn't she?” Kate asked me.

Eileen's unfathomable motives even affected how I viewed Lulu. I felt sorry for the poor creature, who spent much of her day pacing and calling for the owner that she considered to be her mother. Three days was an eternity in duck time, however, and I had expected her to accept her duckness and join the flock by now. While I was glad that Lulu didn't act like Victor, I wished that she possessed a little of his grit.

“She's eating well,” I assured Kate. “And we did see her in the pool a couple of times. Nobody's picking on her, either. Her size intimidates the other ducks, and Liza and Hailey aren't the least bit aggressive.”

Lulu started squirming again, Kate let her hop off her lap, then stood up and joined me outside the pen. I shut the door, fastening both latches and wondering whether my mom had found the house keys that she'd reported lost. Instead of running up to the fence to see where her owner had gone, Lulu wandered over to the girls preening near the back of the pool. She looked so much like our white Pekin Richie, who lived in the barn, that I wished I could put the two together. For all his gentleness, however, Richie was too much of a ladies' man to trust with the gals.

“I can tell a definite difference in her,” Kate told me sadly. “She's already left me, even if she doesn't fully realize it yet. I'm glad I didn't bring Geri.”

“No, I guess that wouldn't have been good,” I agreed. Her perceptiveness impressed me. I had paid too much attention to Lulu's larger behavior and missed the more subtle signs that she was starting to fit in. “It's tough to lose a friend,” I told her as a chickadee called his wide-awake song from the roof of our milk house.

For the first time in my forty-eight years of life, I found myself wishing that my mother was more like a duck as I watched Lulu quickly get over the loss of her “mom.” Understandably enough, my mother remained a long way from reconciling herself to losing my dad. After having tea with her and trying on a few of my father's sweaters, I decided to check with Mrs. Teany, across the street, to determine whether she was helping or hindering the situation.

I felt stupid standing on Judy Teany's porch and even worse when she insisted that I sit in a ridiculously large recliner in the living room. As its great striped bulk engulfed me, I whisked back forty years in time to the house then owned by the widowed Mabel Kuipers and my faux-pas asking, “Why did Mr. Kuipers die?” as my feet dangled from her couch. I could have phoned Judy instead of dropping by, but I needed to figure out whether she was acting strangely or my mom had been making things up. Her alleged remark about eating in the basement to avoid seeing the light in my mom's kitchen nettled me, as did my mom's recent claim that Mrs.
Teany had walked into the garage and walked out with my father's grass seeder without asking if she could borrow it.

“Would you care for a Little Debbie cake?” Judy asked. “We have maple cream sandwiches.”

I thanked her, no. “Mr. Teany's gone?”

“Don went out to mail a letter. I hope he's okay.” She lifted the clock from the coffee table, then set it back down on its well-worn spot on the fabric-covered mat. “You never know what might happen,” she sighed with the arch of a penciled eyebrow.

I didn't remember the dark woodwork throughout the room, though it may only have seemed dark in the midday indoor dusk. She'd bunched the sheers so tightly across her curtain rods, they could hardly be called sheers any longer. They were more like paper towels soaking up the sun. This was, I realized, the first time I'd ever spoken to Judy without my mother's presence. And except for an exchange of pleasantries at the funeral home, this was the first time I'd spoken to her at all in a decade. We had a lot of catching up to do.

“Maybe he was stopping for shrimp,” she concluded.

“Do you ever go to the Wooden Bridge Fish Market? Up on Plainfield.”

“Oh. I thought I heard a car door.” After a moment, she looked at me expectantly.

“The Wooden Bridge Fish Market.”

She smiled as if I had complimented her.

The problem with determining whether Judy had run off the rails was that nearly everyone struck me as provisionally sane at best. I too readily read a character disorder into Judy's display of a teapot-shaped wall plaque with a hanging wooden tab that could be flipped to indicate whether
GRANDMA
was
HAPPY
or
UNHAPPY.
I found myself wishing that my sister Joan could have tagged along
to provide balance. My dad would have made me laugh. A year earlier, he had told me, “That Judy Teany has been sending money to televangelists. I think she's afraid of the end of the world.” This definitely struck me as loopy, but I couldn't link neurosis with pilfering gardening implements—otherwise my barn would be swollen with stolen lawn mowers.

Our halting conversation dramatically improved when my dull comment about how the neighborhood had changed over the years led to a good story about my dad. “I came home from the bank one day and saw your poor father trapped by Mr. Brink while he was trying to wash his car,” Judy told me. Brink was the barely coherent old bore from the next block who had made a habit of sneaking up on my father while he was doing yard work and informing him, “That's how I got my start,” as the launching point for a rambling discourse about his sales career.

“I was so sorry for him,” Judy said. “Your dad was way too nice to tell the old coot to buzz off, like Don would have, so I rushed inside and called your mom and told her, ‘Bette, stick your head out the front door and tell Bob he's got an important phone call.' He was so pleased that I'd rescued him, he invited us over for a highball later.”

“I remember that,” I laughed. “From then on, we sort of kept watch on him and always called him in when Mr. Brink surprised him. But he didn't like it if we made it really obvious, even though Mr. Brink was too far gone to catch on. He started talking to bushes not long after that.”

We continued reminiscing for a while, recalling the stark or pastoral names of neighbors who had moved away or passed away: Gray, Glass, Edge, Rotz, Meadows, and Greenfield. Finally I asked her, “I was wondering if you'd seen my mom recently.”

With a deep intake of air, she raised her large body from the
couch as if the subject was too important to address while seated and headed toward a window. “We just think the world of Bette.”

“She mentioned something to me about a grass-seed spreader.”

“Anything of ours she's free to use, of course.”

“You don't have one of hers?”

“No, but Don could spread some seed. We've got a regular hardware store in the basement. He should be home any moment if you want to ask him for help.”

I joined her at the window. When she pulled back the curtain to gaze out at the curb, the daylight nearly blinded me. “You don't eat dinner in the basement, do you? The one with the hardware store.”

“Why, no.” She let the curtain slip through her fingers.

I pulled it open again. “You can't even see her kitchen from here, can you?” I squinted at the bright stripe of Judy's front sidewalk.

“What's that, dear?”

“My mom's kitchen. You can't see into her kitchen from here.”

I noticed her attitude shifting from one of concern over my mother to vague wariness about me, but I didn't feel comfortable repeating the quote from my mother. “I just meant, I was wondering if you could sort of keep an eye on her.”

“We always do,” she beamed. “We liked your dad so much. It's sad thinking about your mom all alone now over there.” She astonished me by making a clicking sound as she pretended to turn off a switch on the side of her head. “So I just don't think about it.”

I
CAME HOME CONFUSED.
Maybe Judy Teany had swiped my mother's grass-seed spreader after all. My parents hadn't used the grass-seed spreader for years, and my mom certainly didn't need it now. So why would she concoct a fantasy about the
underemployed, unloved grass-seed spreader instead of the far more popular hose, rake, broom, string trimmer, hedge clippers, bucket, hoe, or shovel? My head hurt to think about it. Fortunately an endless succession of animal chores prevented me from probing the bottomless pit of my mom's and Mrs. Teany's idiosyncrasies too deeply.

As soon as Linda cleared the table after dinner, I sat down on the plush and beaten chair next to Stanley Sue's cage, never imagining that the chair was keeping a secret from me. Stanley Sue dropped the peanut that she had been cracking, climbed down from the top of her cage, and stepped onto the arm of the chair. Using her beak to anchor her upper body, she clambered down to the cushion to stand next to my leg. She could have flown the same distance in one-tenth of the time, but she always chose the mountaineer's approach.

“Would you like me to scratch your head?” I asked her. She bent her head as if to let me, and when my hand descended, raised it again as if to bite. This was all part of a nightly ritual, but the unusual activity inside the chair was not.

Across the room, Linda admonished Dusty, “Be nicer to your Donald” as he lunged at the vinyl Donald Duck figure he had long ago decapitated. “Who's this?” she asked, squeaking a barbell-shaped dog toy with a monkey's face on each end. “Is this your Opie?”

I sat forward in the chair. My attention was riveted on Stanley Sue, who had begun to preen with precise jerking motions that reminded me of our failed mechanical bird sentry. She showed impressive control over her feathers. She spread her tail as easily as I would spread my fingers, reached back with her beak to grab some oil from her preen gland, then applied it to the feathers on her back, which popped up like rows of shingles in a windstorm.
With quick strokes she smoothed and arranged one feather after another. Finally she lowered her head in a sign that she would allow me to rub her neck. As I brushed her skin with my fingertip, she made nibbling motions in an expression of satisfaction. I started to lose myself in her. I fell into the fish eye facing me, jumped to the curved plane of her upper beak, and was about to wrap myself around her grey reptilian toes when Linda cried out, “A mouse, there's a mouse running up your chair!”

Hopping up, I extended my hand to Stanley Sue and spoke the command that every parrot owner recognizes and that every parrot must obey. I said, “Step up,” ordering her to step onto my hand. She ignored me, turned, and climbed the chair arm, then scaled her cage bars to the door and popped inside to eat a sunflower seed.

I'd gotten over my fear of mice the year I had moved to this house and discovered that the basement was a favorite sightseeing spot for hornets, spiders, earwigs, snakes, chipmunks, squirrels, the occasional well-traveled Norway rat, and, most of all, mice. I still hadn't embraced the concept of vermin jumping out at me, though. So I lifted the cushion warily, beheld an unpleasant secret inside the chair, and felt the blood drain to my feet.

“What?” asked Linda. “What?”

A writhing mass of tiny pink bodies beckoned “hello” from a hole in the upholstery that mama mouse had excavated. For all I knew, the entire chair was stuffed to the bursting point with wriggling, sightless entities that resembled mammalian slugs. I replaced the cushion and turned toward the rain that was rolling off the leaves of our hackberry tree and had darkened the plumage of the goldfinch on our feeder.