Enslaved by Ducks (22 page)

Observing my few bits of completed work when he arrived, Bill complained with a mixture of awe and stinging disappointment, “You’ve already got the whole thing done.” Checking himself from delivering what could have been regarded as a compliment, he hastily added, “I see you’ve turned your yard into a Superfund site. Or is this a special project for the Arts Council—some sort of study in deconstruction?”

With his neatly trimmed salt-and-pepper beard, baseball-style
OCRACOKE ISLAND
hat with clownishly oversize brim,
ST. JOHN, AMERICAN VIRGIN ISLANDS
T-shirt, and military-green tech pants festooned with Velcro-closure pockets that had obviously never been opened, he was the slumming yuppie to the hilt.

Considering that our task consisted of nothing more than hammering together a few boards, hanging a door, and covering the frame with wire mesh, progress didn’t go badly at all. By noon and the appearance of Linda bearing sandwiches and glasses of fizzy water, we had hammered together a few boards.

“That looks good,” Linda said haltingly. Her puzzled expression
only deepened when I explained that the mosquitoes had slowed us down. There wasn’t a buzzing bug in earshot as we gathered around the table on the back deck. Along the fence that separated the swamp from primitive civilization, however, we had spent more time swatting insect diners off our arms than pounding in nails at crooked angles, and there weren’t enough tiny bibs to go around. Actually, our division of labor was nearly perfect. While I had it all over Bill, knocking in three-inch nails reasonably straight for the first inch or so, my strength and attention would rapidly begin to wane. “Finish this one, would you?” I’d squeak, wiping sweat and mosquito bodies from my brow. Bill would finalize the job with a few absentminded whacks while formulating his next derogatory remark.

“The geese are a psychological projection, aren’t they? That’s why you like them. They look like you. They even sound like you, but a lot more masculine.”

“They’re females.”

“Exactly.”

After lunch and a hearty application of mosquito repellant, our pace quickened. We completed the innovatively tilted pen frame, hung the door, rehung it when it banged against the opposite post, then rehung it again after the door planks had decided upon a finished shape. Attaching the wire mesh to the frame turned out to be more time-consuming than anticipated. First there was the problem of unrolling the unwieldy roll without roll or person rolling over. Then came the painful cutting-to-proper-length with tin snips whose snipping ability would have been tested by tin foil. The geese watched our every move with an intensity befitting a hawk, honking conversationally and rustling around the pen with each fresh pratfall or collision of hammer and thumb.

“You’re all right,” I assured them, as we packed up for the day.
“You are very good girls.”

“What’s that sappy voice you’re using?”

“What voice?”

“‘Goosey, goose, goosey,’” cried Bill in a falsetto.

“I don’t talk like that,” I countered.

“You’ve been yodeling like that all day. ‘How’s the goosey doing? Yo-de-lay-de-hoo!’”

“I never yodeled,” I laughed in embarrassment.

“My God.” He folded up the stepladder and stared at me. “I just noticed what’s wrong with you. You’re almost happy, aren’t you?”

“No.”

“You are. For all the years I’ve known you, you never once mentioned the animal kingdom. But here you are with your little goosey friends and a big moronic smile on your face. Either that, or it’s the Zoloft.”

“It’s because you’re about to go home.”

After Bill left, I let the ducks and geese out of their pen and flopped down on a flat section of ground near the redbud tree. I spread my fingers in the warm grass and flicked an ant off my thumb as bumblebees gathered in the spirea bush behind me. Daphne, Chloe, and Maxine wandered only as far as an exquisite patch of mud just on the other side of the pen door, while the two African geese and the male Khaki Campbells chatted excitedly as they ambled up the hill. A fat white cloud released the sun, flooding the back of my eyelids with a vibrant raspberry light. Cars whooshed past the house with their radios playing. The happy grunts of the geese grew close. Though they had the entire yard to graze, they were pecking at the ground with the Khakis a few feet from my legs.

My limbs and brain felt heavy. Sleep nibbled at me—at least I thought it was sleep until I felt a distinct pecking on my shoe. Liza
and Hailey were taking turns playing with my laces, while one of the male Khakis—we couldn’t tell Trevor and Stewart apart—urged them on with whispery quacks. I sat up slowly, but still apparently too fast for Hailey, who stumbled away with a wing-flap. Liza, identifiable by the faint yellow ring around her eyes, held her ground. When I shifted to a cross-legged position, she honked softly and padded closer until her abdomen rested against my calf and she was almost sitting in my lap. I showed her my hand and moved it behind her head to stroke the soft feathers of her neck while she stared at me with an unfathomable eye. She stretched her neck, grabbed a shirt button, and pulled it. On her second try, she had the button and a clump of fabric in her beak. Hailey leaned forward to nip at my shirt pocket. The two boys were showing untoward interest in my pant cuff. It was too much of a good thing. After a seeming eternity outdoors, I stood up and walked through a volley of disappointed honks back into the house to wash Liza’s muddy lipstick off my shirt before Linda could discover it and jump to any conclusions.

People say you can get used to anything. Habits are habits, and repetition makes the most extraordinary events eventually seem commonplace. Back when Binky ran our lives, I learned not to bat an eye whenever I stumbled into our dining room while Linda was putting the bunny to bed. For most rabbit owners, making sure the pet has fresh food and water is sufficient. But Linda went the extra mile by treating Binky to a musical recital and me to the spectacle of my wife on hands and knees in the dining room with her head thrust through the door of the bunny’s cage while singing a lullaby she had composed.

’Cause he’s the bunny,

The very best bunny,

He’s the bunny for

You and me.

As she warbled the song, whose soaring melody suggested a hymn, Linda would pet Binky on the head while attempting to keep him from kicking away the pink hand towel she had draped across his
back. One or two refrains of “The Very Best Bunny” typically provided all the happiness Binky could handle. Any more and he might bolt for the open door.

Pocket parrot Ollie’s bedtime ritual was even more remarkable. Linda would hide Ollie inside a knitted pink tam-o’-shanter she called his “night-night hat.” Clutching one end of the tam, she would swing it back and forth in the manner of a pendulum while scat singing a medley of American standards that usually included “Camptown Races” and “How Much Is That Doggie in the Window?” Eager to see the performance as well as hear it, Ollie would attempt to crawl out of the tam. Once his head popped into view, Linda would snug the hat around his neck and flip him upside down in her lap. Instead of responding with his usual bad temper, he greeted this with excited chirps whose intensity increased as Linda stroked his head with a finger, carefully avoiding his snapping beak.

Neither wife nor parrot was shy about conducting this ritual in front of awestruck company. Linda once even tried instructing our pet-sitter Rhonda in the finer points of the complex ceremony, but our helper shook her head at the idea of mastering the “night-night hat” without months of study.

“How did you ever think this up?” asked a bewildered Rhonda. “How did he get in the hat in the first place?”

Like an ancient traditional dance whose movements have lost their meaning over the centuries, the “night-night hat” has origins that are cloaked in mystery. All we know for certain is that in the not-so-distant past, when Ollie squawked extensively while Linda worked in the kitchen, she occasionally popped him into the pocket of her apron, both quieting the bird and forcing him to live up to the epithet of pocket parrot. Depositing him inside the tam presumably evolved from there, but behavioral anthropologists disagree on the precise mechanism of the transition.

Every three months I endured a less obscure ritual of my own. In order to keep from plunging into the pocket of neurosis that could open up beneath my feet, anywhere and at any time—such as in the living room after witnessing Ollie’s bedtime preparations—I was obliged to visit my psychiatrist, Dr. Glaser, for quarterly updates of my Zoloft prescription. Although the Zoloft had successfully lowered my general feeling of unease, major events, such as any kind of deadline at work or an unintended slight delivered by a stranger, could still smite me with depression and anxiety, especially when the complexity of caring for two incompatible cats, two incompatible rabbits, two naughty parrots, three parakeets, a canary, a dove, five ducks, and a pair of geese wore me out. Since each fifteen-minute session with Dr. Glaser boiled down to his writing out my scrip while I pondered his Johnny Castaway screen saver, a visit every six months would have sufficed. But the office manager insisted that their computer was incapable of scheduling appointments at greater than three-month intervals. I wasn’t sure if this meant that I enjoyed better mental health than the practice’s other patients, exercised better sales resistance, or if all of us had fallen prey to the same bogus scheduling excuse.

A late-winter meeting with Dr. Glaser that would later turn out to be my last began like every other visit. I wandered around a waiting room whose extravagant spaciousness must have discouraged the treatment of agoraphobics. The problem wasn’t finding a place to sit, it was choosing between numerous furniture groupings while wondering if concealed observers were evaluating my choice. Imagine a yawning room the size of an aircraft hanger and stock it with earth-toned couches, loveseats, overstuffed chairs, conference chairs, library tables, coffee tables, end tables, occasional tables, vegetables, table lamps, floor lamps, and accent lighting to form a dozen separate enclaves. Block the windows with opaque curtains, then sprinkle
the room with a sparse population of patients pretending we just happened to be in the neighborhood and stopped by to peruse the magazines.

Dr. Glaser drifted in through a door on the distant horizon as I was absorbing an article in
Fitness
magazine on the ten best ways to sculpt my lower body, a subject near and dear to my heart. He wore a bronze-colored suit with a metallic sheen that complemented his therapeutic approach. His arms hung heavily at his sides, inviting me to forego shaking his hand as he greeted me with a brief smile and a warm over-the-forehead stare. Once I had followed him into his nondescript office and seated myself on the inevitable leather couch, he asked me the usual opening question, “Are you still taking the Zoloft?” His inflection suggested that Zoloft was my friend.

“Yes, I am,” I answered confidently. Meanwhile, Johnny Castaway had just gotten bonked on the head by a coconut that had dropped from the sole tree on his island, rendering him unconscious during the passage of a cruise ship that might have rescued him.

“Is the Zoloft still effective?”

“Yes.”

“Are you experiencing any anxiety or depression while taking the Zoloft?”

“Yes, a little of each. But nothing too debilitating.” I did not elaborate upon the pressures of maintaining and losing pets, nor did I mention the “night-night hat,” fearing he might enter the information in his database. I hated the thought of one day chancing upon an article in
Psychology Today
about psychiatric patient “Robert,” who suffered dangerous delusions about headgear-wearing birds.

“Would you like to increase the dosage of your Zoloft?” he asked with weary encouragement.

“I don’t think so.”

“Shall I write you a prescription for the same dosage of Zoloft that you are currently taking?”

I nodded. I entertained a thought. Any thought was entertaining under the circumstances. “That’s fine. But since we have a couple of minutes, I was wondering if I could ask you a question. About dreams,” I added, expecting a light bulb to flash behind his eyes. Surely dreams were the filet mignon of a psychiatrist’s sustenance, though Dr. Glaser’s manner remained politely disinterested.

“I’ll try to answer your question about dreams.”

“Here’s what I don’t understand. Dreams can conceivably take a person anywhere. Anything is possible in dreams. I could visit different planets as easily as walking out a door. But all of the settings in my dreams are, well, incredibly ordinary. They take place at work, or in my parent’s house, or garage, or in apartments I used to live in, or in my grandmother’s old house. The settings repeat so relentlessly, I could probably list them on half a sheet of paper and still have enough space left over to write a grocery list. I’m just wondering if you might have any ideas why this might be so. The events in my dreams are often complicated, but the settings never are.”

Dr. Glaser thought a moment, then surprised me with his answer. “Would you describe yourself as a person who values consistency in your life?” I had to agree that I would. “Then perhaps the regularity of setting is a choice that you have imposed on your dreams, indicating that you function best with routines and habits and don’t necessarily adapt well to change.”

His words hit me with a powerful insight about pet ownership. Rather than blaming our animals for adding complexity to my life, perhaps I should thank them for simplifying it. After all, they helped reduce the potentially unlimited possibilities of existence
to a series of tedious and predictable daily routines. Nothing could suit the temperament of a timid man better. Instead of laying ambitious plans for the future or even building up a healthy clientele for my freelance writing business, I could pack each day to the brim directing ducks in and out of their pens, separating fighting rabbits, and keeping parrot-seed dishes filled. The notion that something other than folly might lie behind my acquisition of nearly countless pets brought me a tingle of joy. I overflowed with gratitude toward Dr. Glaser.