Plumage (2 page)

Sassy knew Racquel only slightly, not having worked at the hotel for long. She knew that Racquel was the proprietor of PLUMAGE, the boutique in the doorway of which she had been loafing. Other than that, Sassy knew of Racquel only what she saw: a handsome ebony woman of statuesque, even monumental height, lavishly dressed, and crowned unto an even greater altitude with a new metallic-luster hair sculpture each week.

“Could you see,” Sassy appealed, gesturing with her hovering hand, “is there something on my head?”

Racquel could easily see. In heels, Racquel stood a good foot-and-a-half taller than Sassy.

“Good Lord,” said Racquel in her rich contralto voice, studying the top of Sassy's flat straggle of hair, “it looks like bird poop.”

“But—” Sassy's sense of the proper order of things in life had been much disturbed of late, and she didn't like it. She struggled with this latest violation. “But are there supposed to be birds in here?”

“Not that I know of.” Despite perfectly correct diction, Racquel's low-pitched drawl still spoke of someplace south of Florida, making Sassy think of sugar and deep-throated velvety blossoms. “But I'm telling you, honey, it's bird poop.”

Sassy contemplated this appraisal of her situation for a moment. Sassy felt her well-trained self-control tightening like steel bands around a narrow barrel. Her shoulders closed a warning grip on her neck, her butt clenched as if she might be spanked—but inexorably the emotion in her flat chest arose and rose, swelling like a tsunami, until she had no choice but to let it burst forth in a wail of existential angst. “Good grief,” Sassy cried, “my mother gets Alzheimer's, my husband runs off with a chippie, I lose my house, they sell my miserable jewelry at auction, I have to take this scutty job, and now you're telling me a
bird pooped on me
?”

“Really? Sweeeet!” Gracefully Racquel bent at the knees to look into Sassy's face, studying her with newly piqued interest.

Sassy stamped her foot, clunky in its orthopedically correct white nursie shoe. “Would you get it
off
me?”

“Sure, honey. Just a minute, just let me get a Kleenex or something.” Long-legged, potent, sleek in iridescent silk, with a length of chiffon floating from her neck, Racquel strode off toward her shop.

Waiting for her to come back, glowering at the smooth taffy-colored trunks of ficus-on-steroids trees, at sunlit glass casting rainbows on too much carpet, at designer-clad couples eating tiramisu at fountainside, Sassy pondered imponderables: Why? Why this, why now?
Why me
?

What damn bird
?

Through her unhappy thoughts she heard something whirring, a dry, airy sound. Before she could quite focus, something, a blur of barbaric lime-green and lemon-yellow, shot down from above her, out of tree plumes and glassy skylight. Sassy heard a squawk of demonic glee as her already-violated hair stirred in its own personal whirlwind and the incubus thumped down upon the left rim of her glasses, throwing her world even more off-balance than it already was. In front of her left eye, smack against the forcibly tilted lens, separated from her tender cornea only by glass and a scant half inch of air, there appeared a yellow manifestation that she could not begin to interpret. She could only gawk, cross-eyed, at—what? She saw bilateral symmetry out of which her mind tried to organize a face, but the thing had too many eyes, six of them, a big pair of black ones and a little pair of kudzu-berry blue ones and those other ones off to the sides—and what was the hard brownish steeple where a nose should have been?

Then the steeple moved, knocking against her lens as if the yellow demon wanted in.

Sassy's overstressed self-control snapped entirely. She screamed.

She had not previously known that she was capable of such a scream, an exquisite supra-soprano paean of terror, a soaring, feral, thrilling bright yellow scream. Glass should have broken. Several hotel guests turned their bored, orthodontically correct heads to stare at her.

With the same powerful whir, the demon vanished from in front of Sassy's left eye. Undone by the sudden change of vectors, her glasses fell off, and she let out another wail, because she couldn't see and she was afraid to move to try to find them.

“A parakeet!” said Racquel's voice close behind her.

Sassy jumped, her hands grabbing at air. “What?” she bleated.

“A parakeet! How bogus can you get? A freakin' parakeet, hanging on your glasses with its tail up in the air.” Racquel's voice moved in front of Sassy, and Sassy felt Racquel slipping her glasses back onto her head, but she still couldn't see anything but a blur; her eyes had filled with annoying, childish tears.

“I guess we know now what pooped on your head,” Racquel said.

“It
scared
me.” Sassy heard her voice starting to come apart, and hated herself. Saying a thing like that. Sounding like a three-year-old.

She felt Racquel dabbing gently at the top of her head. “It was just a dinky little parakeet,” Racquel said, her contralto voice a bit too soothing, like that of a Victorian nanny crooning,
There, there
.

Sassy yelled, “I didn't know what it was! You try looking at a parakeet upside down all of a sudden and see if you can figure out what it is!”

“Shhhh!” But Racquel began to shake with silent laughter; her gentle hands shook atop Sassy's head. She gave up on the bird poop. “There. It's mostly gone.” Her voice quivered with suppressed laughter. “What's left doesn't show much. Blends right in with the gray.”

“Oh,
wonderful
. Thank you
so
much.”

Racquel pressed several Kleenex into Sassy's hands—the supreme humiliation, from Sassy's point of view; she had hoped that Racquel wouldn't notice that she needed them. “Have a nice day,” said Racquel with a chuckle as she strode away.

Abandoning her carpet sweeper, Sassy bolted for the nearest rest room.

She nearly fled into the men's by mistake, but caught herself in time and blundered into the ladies', which, mercifully, was unoccupied. After she washed her face with cold water and dried it with a paper towel and blew her nose and got herself together somewhat, she dared to face a mirror to see how she looked. Specifically, her hair; how bad was it? Bird poop blending right in with the gray, indeed.

The problem of poop on Sassy's mind, however, was quickly superseded by another. In the mirror, her reflection was not there.

Not. There.

Instead—

In the mirror, seemingly perched on air in the vicinity of what should have been Sassy's heart, a little blue parakeet looked back at her.

Sassy blinked.

Closed her eyes a moment.

Took a deep breath, opened her eyes again and looked.

Stared.

She was still not there.

And the parakeet still was.

There. In the mirror. Its head up. Staring back at her with eyes like tiny tourmalines set in silver.

Sassy glanced down at herself. She was still there. That was her potbellied body under green shirtwaist and stupid ruffled apron. Those were her hands, shaking. She lifted them to her head, felt her own solid skull, her own face, her own eyes, reassuringly gelatinous under rubbery eyelids; all the essential parts still seemed to be in place. Through her fingers she looked at the mirror again.

Parakeet.

It should have been a pretty little parakeet. Cobalt-blue, with a cute creamy white face. But Sassy did not find it pretty. She flinched and clenched her fingers together, hiding behind them.

“Give me a break,” she whispered. Sassy was not a religious person, especially not lately, but her posture was undeniably that of prayer. “Give me a break,” she whispered again, “please.” Slowly she lowered her hands from her eyes.

It was still there. Little blue parakeet. Looking straight back at her.

Sassy didn't reason anything out—that the cant of the parakeet's head was the mirror image of hers, the stare of the beady eyes, the same as hers—she couldn't think; her mind was farting way too hard for thought. But ineluctably she knew: that bird was her reflection now. Her self.

Perched in sweetleaf, hidden in greenfree that matched his own green coverts, Kleet shivered in awe. He trembled, all his feathers prickling. Even his feet quivered on the twig they clutched, even his beak quivered—for he had just encountered Deity face-to-face.

Almost by mistake, prompted by some strange urging from beyond the hard air, he had annointed her plumage. Her limbs had lifted to him, her bare pale twigs had extended to him. He had flown to her; he had skreeked her and she had skreeked him back. It was the shellbreak day of his young life.

Only Deity knew what marvels would now ensue.

Sassy called in sick to work for the next three days and shut herself in her apartment, crying, contemplating her own sanity or lack thereof, looking in mirrors and trying not to look in mirrors because when she did, the parakeet that stared back at her remained as omnipresent and blue as ever. Sometimes it hunched its shoulders and stretched its wings. Sometimes it peered at her slantwise. Sometimes it bent into a U to preen its tail feathers, and once it scratched its own head, standing on one foot with the other foot stuck behind its wing, clownish. It wasn't always the same, but like a budgie in a cage, it was always there.

One time it gaped its beak at her in an infantile sort of toothless grin, which charmed her not at all. “Just go away,” she told it, but it didn't.

Sassy tried to think of sensible solutions to her dilemma, but none came to mind.

The fourth day she had to go back to work, because after three days she would need a doctor's excuse, just like in junior high school, and hers was not the sort of problem one took to one's family physician. Also, she needed the hours. Her paycheck was going to be even more pathetic than usual this week.

“I won't look,” she muttered, brushing her teeth over the bathroom sink with her eyes closed against the bathroom mirror. But instinct made her look in the mirror as she reached for her hairbrush, and she almost burst out crying. She stamped her bare foot on the linoleum instead.

“Ow!” she yelled at the bird in the mirror, because now her foot hurt. “You stupid budgie, what the—” But Sassy never said hell. “
What
do you want? I can't even see myself to comb my hair!”

It didn't really matter. Her hair, baby-fine and as flaccid as spaghetti, was useless for anything except to be scrunched under a ratty old scarf on the way to work.

The winter air breezed right through the scarf. Since when were these things supposed to protect your ears? Mama had always trained her to wear one to guard against earache, but then, look at Mama. Look at Sassy, her mama's image. Here came the mezzanine maid in her ugly babushka.

Sassy was supposed to enter the Sylvan Tower by a discreet back entrance, but she didn't. The parking garage was filled, she had to find a spot on the street, which meant that she had to put her lunch money into the meter, and the February morning was as cold as Frederick's heart, and damn everything. She scuttled in through the lofty doors to the main lobby and made her way through its labyrinth of gift shops and jewelers and haute couturiers and cafés and fountainside dining to the elevators, to go down to the swimming-pool level and the catacombs where she reported to work.

The Sylvan Tower Hotel was rife with mirrors. The hallways were mirrored, the bottoms of balconies were mirrored, the undersides of escalators were mirrored, every surface the decorators didn't know what else to do with was mirrored, including the elevator shaft, which was walled with gold-tone mirrors outlined in neon. Standing in front of one, waiting, Sassy braced herself and looked. Her parakeet was there, standing on air, as usual. Next to it, with its scaly black three-toed feet almost on the floor, stood a bored-looking six-foot brownish crane.

Sassy yelped.

“Something wrong, ma'am?” asked the businessman standing next to her.

“Uh, no. No, not at all.” Babbling, Sassy glanced from the businessman to the crane, the crane to the businessman. Both were tall. There the resemblance ended. Yet—she knew it was him.

“You sure you're okay, ma'am? You look gray.”

“Um, no, no, I'm fine.” Blessedly, at that moment the elevator arrived. In an inflamed frame of mind, Sassy rode it down and reported to work.

By afternoon, when she cleaned the mezzanine, she had calmed down. After all, if she was going to be looking at a parakeet in the mirror for the rest of her life, what did it matter if she saw other people as birds too? Vacuuming, she observed with interest the beveled-glass mirrors beautifying the wall as hotel guests strode by. A fashionable woman minced past, and in the mirror a sparrow fluttered along beside her; how could that be? A teenage boy darted by with a gull skimming along in the mirror; that seemed more apt. A man stood talking to his wife, and there was a green-headed duck soundlessly quacking. The wife was a brown-mottled sort of quail or prairie chicken or something; Sassy wasn't sure. The next woman was easy, a crow, but then came a whole series of birds Sassy didn't know: a black-and-white pinto one, something that whizzed past trailing an immensely long tail, something large that stalked by on stiltlike legs, something red and blue that bobbed as it flew, a bird that (like its human) had an enormous mouth flanked by whiskers, and a bird striped like a convict, cowering on the mirrored floor.

Whew. After a while, feeling dizzy from trying to remember them all, Sassy stopped watching.

Nobody else was a parakeet. Or even a parrot, for that matter.

Sassy vacuumed her way past the boutique in which Racquel loomed behind the counter sweet-talking customers and bossing her employees. It occurred to Sassy that she owed Racquel an apology. She had been quite snippy to Racquel the other day when Racquel was only trying to help her.

It occurred to her, also, to wonder what sort of bird Racquel was.