The Lovebird (4 page)

He was abstracted under the swirling hues of the rented light machine. His magnetism, which was the pull of something beautiful but broken and in need of fixing, changed the air around us the same way it changed the pupils in the eyes of the neighborhood wives. His hair was coal black, and it contrasted with his light green eyes, the lids of which swooped down dreamily over the outside corners. His skin was translucent, the blood easily
visible beneath his fine cheeks. His body was long, and his head was aristocratic, like one of the nineteenth-century sculptures our class had seen on a trip to the art museum. Some of the female faculty, who had initially dreaded their duties as dance chaperones, held themselves in strange, self-conscious ways whenever Dad and I danced past them. They abandoned the crusty cardiganed slouch of teachers’ lounge lunches and Citizen of the Week certificate ceremonies, arched their backs to emphasize their matronly breasts, and sucked in their cheeks to resemble feminine fish.

Dad was oblivious to the women. He was as focused on me as he could ever be, joking, solicitous, smiling, until the last hour of the dance. Then he lost his equilibrium, not on the dance floor, but on the inside.

Maybe the music made him maudlin. The DJ had been punctuating poppy contemporary hits with occasional 1920s tunes, and one of those old-timey songs came on while we danced. I widened my eyes at him because it was called “Margie.”

My little Maaarrgie, I’m always thinking of you, Maaarrgie, I’ll tell the world I love you …

Or maybe it was the Beirut-brown color that my hair appeared to be under the golden glow of the slowly turning mirror ball.

A few other people might have noticed the tears before I did because I had my face tucked into Dad’s chest. A movement there jostled my cheek, and that’s when I looked up. He wasn’t making any sounds, but his mouth was twisted down and his wet face looked like one face again, not two.

We left. By the time we reached the car, he had composed himself. He asked me if I’d had fun. He couldn’t bear to mention what had happened. I said I had. At home, I went upstairs, took off my dress, put my corsage in the porcelain figurine shaped like a woman’s palm that had always been on my nightstand, the same
one that held my rose-scented rosary made of real rose petals, and tried to sleep.

Life got lonelier after that. Even if only a few people had actually seen Dad crying at the dance, it was, after all, a junior high dance, and messages among thirteen-year-olds spread faster than fire on a parched prairie. Soon, the whole school knew. Violet Holmquist retreated to a safe and snooty distance. She joined the girls who stood in gossipy gaggles and whispered “weirdo,” “dad,” and “drunk” sharply in each other’s ears if I chanced to pass them. I did my best to feign contented absorption in a magical, private world of my own, wishing that someone would talk to me while also praying fervently to Saint Jude, patron saint of lost causes and desperate cases, that no one would. Meanwhile, my cheeks flamed in the manner of Dad’s, and my feet felt far too big for my body. I buried my head in books.

WHEN I CAME HOME FOR WINTER BREAK
after my first semester at college, I tried to be strong in the face of Dad’s floundering. On Christmas Eve we watched
It’s a Wonderful Life
and exchanged a few presents. I asked him if he wanted to go to midnight Mass, but he said no. We did pray together that night, though. I held his hand while we said the Our Father, and it didn’t feel anymore like my little hand in his, but like his little hand in mine. When I went back to school for the second semester, I was very sick.

3
GERBIL
(Meriones unguiculatus)

AFTER I RECOVERED FROM THE MALADY
that had inspired Simon to offer me his office sofa, he invited me to dinner. He wanted to take me to a restaurant he loved near the beach. I agonized over what to wear. I had never imagined, when I dreamed of dates on which I never went with college boys who never talked to me, that anyone would take me to an actual sit-down restaurant. The dark-haired dates of my daydreams unfailingly escorted me to one of San Diego’s numerous two-dollar taco stands, where my homespun sundresses were always appropriate.

But, of course, Simon Mellinkoff was not a boy. And he, the descendant of millers, had milled me in his office. And then, a few days later, he had written, in his standard red ink, a message at the bottom of my latest Latin quiz: “Will you have dinner with me?” (It had been a daring move on his part, I thought, considering that, had I been capricious or conniving, or simply regretful about what had happened between us, I could have handed that quiz cum invitation straight to the dean.
Pretty complacent
, I thought.) So I had to find something nice to wear, a task so challenging I actually solicited the opinions of my roommates.

“Um, who is the guy?” asked Amy, a pasty chemistry major
who subsisted on sugary fruit tarts and never cleaned their gelatinous drippings out of the toaster oven.

“Oh, just somebody I met at school.” I cleared my throat. “In Latin.”

I held up my only two
dressy
dresses: a floral-printed polyester frock with a lace collar and sleeves that verged dangerously toward puffy, which I’d worn to my confirmation at Holy Rosary at age fourteen (I hadn’t grown much since then), and a vintage white sheath accompanied by a slender brass belt with a buffalo-shaped buckle that I had spontaneously and sneakily taken from Rasha’s closet over winter break.

“If he takes Latin he’d probly prefer the white,” opined Amy. “It’s sort of toga-like.”

Winnie was an exchange student from Taiwan who kept a pet gerbil in her bedroom. During one of our few social interactions, she had introduced me to the Double Happiness #1 Chinese Goods Emporium in downtown San Diego, where I’d bought a pair of intricately embroidered red cloth shoes that I believed by their brightness alone would bring me good luck. Winnie recommended the floral. “It will show him that you are a modest girl,” she said.

In the end, I wore neither of those dresses but instead made a harried trip to the mall, where I procured a black jersey va-va-voom with no sleeves at all, the most grown-up dress I’d ever had, and a pair of high-heeled peep toes. I little suspected when I bought the peep toes, for which I took the time to put a fresh coat of red paint on my biggest and second-biggest toes (remembering Simon’s feelings about feet), that I would wear them only once. But that was what happened because, after dinner, as he walked me to my station wagon with his arm wrapped around my waist, before whispering in my ear that I should follow him home, Simon looked toward the ground with a frown and asked, “Are those genuine leather?”

•  •  •

SIMON HAD CHOSEN A TINY MEXICAN PLACE
for our rendezvous, but it was different from any restaurant I had ever visited because, as I discovered upon reading the menu, every dish was prepared without meat or dairy products.

“Wow, this looks delicious,” I offered, genuinely intrigued by the prospect of potato-filled taquitos smothered in soy cheese. Simon nodded. He appeared as nervous as me and was charmingly tongue-tied. After all, we had only been alone together once before.

“Your dress,” he said, and then drifted off. We looked at the walls. They were adorned with Frida Kahlo prints and lots of old black-and-white photographs of soldierly sorts wearing big-brimmed hats and mustaches, all of them toting guns and bedecked in bandoliers.

Simon saw me studying them. “Zapatistas,” he said. Before I could respond, our waitress came. Simon ordered for himself and, just before I was able to tell her what I wanted, he ordered for me, too.

“How did you know I wanted the potato taquitos?” I asked. Warmth suffused my limbs, and my feet throbbed in their snug shoes. Simon shrugged, grinned, fiddled with the pack of cigarettes in his shirt pocket. “Our waitress is so beautiful,” I said.

“She’s probably a vegan. It’s amazing how a woman can glow when she decides to stop consuming the products of cruelty.”

“Hmm.” I nodded. Again, my gaze drifted toward the wall decor, and Simon, growing more relaxed, went on.

“The Zapatistas. These were members of a guerrilla movement that formed during the Mexican Revolution almost a century ago. They fought for the rights of the Indians who had lost so much of their land. Brave people.” My eyes landed on an electrifying portrait of a young woman soldier dressed in men’s
clothing. She stood with one hand resting sassily on her hip. In her other hand, she held an enormous rifle. “There were female Zapatistas, too,” Simon said. “One of them was even a commander in the movement,” he added. “A true warrioress.”

The tortilla chips in a basket between us were warm and fragrant, and their bready scent—so wholesome, safe, right, and good—hovered over our table, creating a kind of enchantment. “It’s one thing to have beliefs,” Simon continued. He crunched a chip between his teeth, swallowed, and lifted a napkin to his lips. “It’s another to actually act on them, fearlessly and passionately.”

I HAD BEEN TOO EXCITED TO EAT
much during our date. But from that night on, Simon sought to nourish me, in his way. “I feel like you’re starved,” he said one night as we lay beneath his cool bedsheet. “Not so much foodwise,” he said, “but starved”—he rested his hand on my chest, where my heartbeat sped up slightly—“here”—then grazed the crooks of each of my elbows, which had so infrequently touched another body in an embrace—“and here”—then laid a palm on my womb, where my left ovary hummed—“and here.”

All the characteristics over which I had swooned as a shy smitten student—the dry jokes, the secret Russian surname, the parking tickets, the accent with its promise of mischievous midnight murmurs—came together in one multifaceted and radiant whole, and now that I was close enough, I could actually see them all, shining sharply like cut gemstones, when I stared into Simon’s eyes.

He hardly had to coax me to leave Amy, Winnie, and the gerbil to join him and Annette in their labyrinthine house in La Jolla. La Jolla was a quiet seaside town where none of the houses looked anything like the two-story rancher—which, in
its pre-decay days, might have had an aesthetic best described as pseudo-Southwestern—that Dad and I had shared in the Tierra de Flores tract. They were sleek and shone like brand-new coins, and even the slightly shabby abodes among them looked as though their shabbiness was cultivated and carefully maintained, not a consequence of sadness. On the sidewalks, wealthy ladies walked little lapdogs with rhinestone-encrusted leashes. There were art galleries specializing in dewy oil renderings of dolphins, and breakfast cafés with offerings like brie-and-wild-blueberry-stuffed pancakes. In spite of my delight at being taken in by Simon, I felt alien as a desert flower in that moist and misty enclave.

Simon’s shadowy dwelling was tucked away behind two doors: a heavy, dark outer door, which faced the sidewalk and opened to a courtyard, and an inner door, which opened to the house. Everything about the place was, as he termed it, “green.” There were energy-efficient bulbs in each lamp, and the heating and cooling systems were powered by the sun. The various trash cans were all individually designated for different kinds of waste: aluminum, glass, paper, compost. The linens were organic cotton and laundered with earth-friendly detergent. I scanned the gleaming nooks and corners for traces of Simon and Annette—a stray sock or a slip-on shoe, a fallen flaxen hair, an old newspaper—but there were none. All the incidental signs of their lives were swept into oblivion by a maid who appeared thrice weekly. “I think you’ll be comfortable here,” Simon said.

He bought me bolts of fabric so I could sew as many sundresses with straps that came easily untied as I wished. He paid for my yellow bicycle to have a tune-up. He stared at me with interest even when I was engaged in the most prosaic of activities, such as cleaning the crannies of my ears with a cotton swab or tugging a comb through my uncooperative curls. He listened when I recited the poems I loved best from my Intro to Japanese
Poetry class. And he talked to me. He asked me all the questions he had wanted to ask when I had been nothing but a strange schoolgirl, when he had watched me just before class every day (yes, it had been every day) as I walked my bike across the quad while he sat on his stone bench surrounded by birds.

“Do you have any friends?”

This time I answered him. “No.”

“Do you have a family?”

“Not really.”

“Do you have a boyfriend?”

“Only you.”

“Do you know how absolutely lovely, winsome, and precious you are?” he said, bundling me in his arms, the way a person holds a baby, after my shower.

And it was only then that Simon set about enriching my education. He was impressed with my overall intelligence, and did not care to drill me further in Latin (despite the fact that my grasp of it faltered further with each successive chapter in
Wheelock’s
). Instead, Simon educated me about animals and their plight. He picked up where he had left off with the Gandhi quote he had recited in his office, handing me, one after another, all of the books whose titles I had read that day, followed by dozens more with a similar slant.