Silent Bird (17 page)

And suddenly—inexplicably—I felt
a burst of something winged and irresistible: a taste of joy? Of love? I was restless with emotion—with regret. And longing. I threw my arms around him and laughed.

“
What is it?” he asked, laughing too.

“
Nothing. Just that I love you very, very much.”

“
That is not nothing,
Chérie.
It is only the sun and the moon.”

“Believe me
I don’t want to have…a problem.”
Say it!
“A sexual problem.”

“
Oh, I do not think you have a sexual problem.”

“
No?”

“
Sex involves the brain, Pilar. What we think. That is our most important sex organ. You have a sickness of the mind, or spirit.”

Wow.
Who needed a psychologist? I wished more than ever that Jeannot spoke English. Maybe if he spoke English I would know what exactly to say to him. But French…French was the distant landscape that gave me relief from problems. How to use it to describe things I’d never told anyone in any language?

As we got ready for bed, he began singing a tune I recognized from the piano.
No words, just
la, di, da,
which sound awfully alike in both French and English. Stark naked and singing and humming, Jeannot slid between the sheets of our bed. Still humming, he watched me pull on my T-shirt. And when I climbed into bed beside him I noticed his response, physically, in the most reassuring way I could think of.

I actually felt relief.
I might not desire sex exactly, not enough, not the way a lover should. But the need for Jeannot to desire me was so tall I couldn’t see over it. I was a young child again, welded to whatever path brought me comfort—and shame.

Cha-cha-cha
.

The high school is nearly empty when I show up for counseling. The secretary who got stuck working all summer sits under some plants in the corner, her glasses dangling from a chain around her neck. She says hello, cranes forward her neck and pushes on her glasses to stare at me, and the tendrils of the spider plant are nothing compared to how far out her eyes bulge.

I knock o
n the psychologist’s open door. Dr. Minfield waves me in. Unshaven with smudges visible under his glasses, he looks tired. Tired and hungry; he’s busy devouring a pastry as I cross the room and sit. To my surprise, he doesn’t stop eating to start our session. I know he’s going to ask me about TAG; TAG, who has been high on the Doc’s agenda lately. And I am so tired of the questions yet not at all tired of coming to this office. I wonder how Doc feels about me, if he’s as happy as I am when we’re together. He notices my legs at least. That I know.

When every crumb of the pastry is consumed, he
leans back, folds his hands behind his neck and sighs. “Sorry to spring this on you, Pilar, but I'm going to have to take some time off. At least a month, maybe longer. I've got, well, some personal things to attend to. Things I didn’t expect. So we’ll need to conclude our sessions together. I usually like to give my students more notice. I am very sorry about that.”

I did not expect this. I close my gaping mouth and ask, “
Are you stopping with everyone, or just me?”

“With everyone, of course. Don’t be silly.”

“I’m not silly. Just hurt.”

He flushes, holding the bridge of his glasses with one finger to keep them from sliding off his nose; I’m tempted to go into the other room and snatch the secretary’s chain off her neck.

“Come on, don’t be like that, Pilar. I work at two schools, and the other one is much busier. But busy or not, I do need to take time off there too. This is not personal. Everything is not about you. We’ve discussed that.”

“Right.”

“I’ve enjoyed our talks,” he says softly.

“Really?”

“Really. You are a bright, creative girl with a great sense of humor. Why shouldn’t I?”

Because I’m a kid
, I want to shout. And because you like me. You think I’m cute. You want to jump my bones as much as I want to jump yours.

“
We’re practically friends, aren’t we?” I say instead. “And friends watch out for each other. I can tell you’re upset.”

“
Thank you for your concern. It’s very kind of you. But please don’t worry about me.”

“
Am I right?
Are
you upset?”

“Hey, I’m
the counselor here.” He tries a smile and fails. “Okay, smarty-pants, I guess I am upset. You’re very perceptive.”

“
Are you married?” Again, a question on impulse and, again, I don’t expect an answer.

But Dr. Minfeld says,
“Not anymore I'm not.”

“
Oh. Really? You’re getting divorced?”

“
Yes. Yes, I am getting divorced, not that I should be talking about this to you, young lady.” He stands. “I really must say goodbye now. I don’t think this is a good time for you to be here.”

Because you want me
. And I want you! What's so bad about that?

When he holds out his hand, I initiate our ritual
handshake: fist, palms, thumbs, fist. Finally he does smile, big and bright: very un-psychologist-like. My heart isn’t beating right as I throw my arms around his neck.

At first he does
n’t do anything to stop me. He just stands there, frozen, letting me do the hugging. Until finally he thaws and curls his long torso to hug me back. I can feel his heart thundering, too. Sounds like our hearts are dancing madly together: a high-speed
cha-cha-cha
…

Except…we shouldn’t be doing this. He shouldn’t be hugging me, and
I shouldn’t be hugging him, this nice guy who has tried to help me. I shouldn’t press my body against his.
That’s
what’s wrong—the fact that I know what’s right and wrong, yet I do the wrong thing anyway. I
want
to do the wrong thing.

Suddenly d
isgusted with myself, I yank away. “Don’t worry about me, I’ll be fine,” I say, and grab my backpack and nearly run past the buggy-eyed secretary and her spidery plants, out of the summer-dead school office into the heat-dead real world.

Slut!
Pilar IS a slut
. To taunt me, my mind uses the voices of the kids at school, kids who already know about me; guys and girls who know that I slept with a teacher. How disgusting; the biology teacher wasn’t even young and handsome like Dr. Minfield.

E
ven TAG won’t talk to me anymore.
Slut!

So what do I
do when my friends and enemies know about me, and TAG, and now the cutie-pie school psychologist? What would any moron with a reputation like mine do?

Try to seduce
him too: that’s what!

“Sweet dreams tonight,” Jeannot said as we lay in bed.

It was the next weekend, seven days before his big concert. Saturday night, the heavy syrupy scent of mimosa wafting in…and no sex for us just yet. No massages either though we’d been cuddling and kissing a lot. Just innocent romance and sleep: what could be better than that?

“Sweet dreams and no sleepwalking, I promise,” I said, and held onto him like a kid learning to ride a bicycle.

“
Every rose has a thorn and every thorn has a rose
,” Mama says, reaching out to touch my pigtails. “You know what that means?”

“
No, what?”

“
Well, you know that roses have thorns. That’s why we have to be careful touching them. And I’m saying that thorns have roses too. It means that even something ugly or painful has its nice moments, and vice versa. You understand?”

“
Yes,” I say, though I don’t. Ugly and painful things are never nice. Why does Mama say they are?

“
In Ladino it sounds like this. De la rosa, sale el espino, del espino sale la rosa.”

“
Ladino’s funny,” I say, giggling, and she giggles too.

“No, y
ou’re the funny one! But, Pilar, I bring this up because I’m trying to say we should accept misfortunes, even ones we don’t understand. Some things aren’t meant to be understood.”

“
Oh,” I say. Not understanding.

“
Do you have a picture you want to show me, honey?” she asks suddenly. “Your latest one from school? Your teacher called and told me about it.”

That
drawing is still in my book bag. It’s next to a box of newly sharpened pencils, a book on turtles, and some brown leaves that I have decided to save and put back on the trees in the springtime. I hope that Mama will not get sad when I show her my picture, just say she likes it and hang it on our new pink refrigerator. Miss Guest looked sad and asked a lot of questions: Does your father live with you? When was the last time you saw him?

“
How beautiful,” Mama says. But she’s frowning at it; at the three people on a beach near a forest filled with large rabbits, multicolored birds and happy-looking trees. “Pilar, there are no mouths again. You didn’t give anybody a mouth. Shouldn’t you finish their faces?”

“
Um”—I think so hard my head hurts—“I guess so. Except then they’ll get The Bad Eye.”

“Bad eye? H
oney…is this because of that healer we went to?”

I
wait, trying to guess whether she wants me to say yes or no. The healer was so old her eyes looked yellow and her mouth puckered like a baby’s. She had knuckles as swollen as tree trunks: full of bumps and knobs and spots. And her clothes! The lady wore a long gown and robe like pajamas but with a small woolen hat. She wore a pretty golden brooch and a belt around a belly bigger than Santa Claus’. Even if she wasn’t jolly. In a dark room full of chattering parakeets in cages, I sat on thick red carpets and listened to her chant:

“
For the heavens, and the earth, for the ocean and the sand, and for the sand, and for the seventy of the Sanhedrin, for those who swear in truth for the Synagogue and the Lord, may the evil eye leave you!”

After the prayer the lady poured water into a pan, threw in a fistful of salt, and washed my arms and legs with a cold rag.
It tickled. I tried to be still, tried to be good, tried to make everyone happy by letting them do what they wanted. But I didn’t know why I was supposed to bathe in salt when I usually have to bathe to get salt
off
me. Like after a day at Robert Moses beach when Mama says I can’t sit down to dinner unless I shake my towel first and then march straight into the bathroom.

“I didn’t
like the healer,” I tell Mama. “But I don’t want to have a bad eye.”

“
Pilar. Poor sweetie. We have to remember to find the rose in the thorn, and the thorn in the rose. All things in balance. That’s what I’ve come to believe, not that other nonsense.”

“Oh.”

“Nothing is all evil, or all good. Nothing is jinxed. There is no Evil Eye. And don’t you believe it either, okay?”

“
Okay,” I say.

Not meaning it.

I woke up on the couch with an aching head, thinking about little girls and wondering about the one missing from Villefranche sur Lez. Had they found her yet? Was she even alive? I knew better than to bring her up again to Jeannot, or to ask how the hell I ended up on the couch. I knew I’d walked there under my own steam, in a trance like a zombie.

“I’m sorry, I can’t go to your parents’ today,” I told him over breakfast. “Can we please stay home, just the two of us?”

“Yes, if you wish. I will get something special to eat,” he said, not missing a beat. Then he asked me to get dressed because we were going to go out and purchase the best chicken in town, like his mother had always found and cooked for him.

Just the thought of chicken made me queasy. So while Jeannot got dressed in the bedroom, I quietly threw up in the toilet.

Good morning
, I thought.

An hour later we were driving back from a local farm with a live chicken in the trunk of the car. And forgive the hyperbole, but the sight and sounds of that chicken really stuck in my craw.

Denial has its
limits, you know, like the expiration date on a bottle of milk. One chicken in the trunk and suddenly I had the sense that I could not live here in France one more season. Our life together, and the life of Jeannot’s family and maybe even his whole village, seemed to be spiraling out of control. Good or bad, nothing lasts forever. All things must evolve or devolve, find their own destinies. How could my destiny be to settle
here
, barefoot and pregnant, amongst his relatives?

“
Do not worry,
Chérie,
” he said, grinning at my expression. “I promise I will not ask you to kill it. When we sit at the table to eat you will not recognize what is in front of you. Your food will look exactly like the thousands of birds you have eaten in America. But the taste…
Quelle différence
!" He kissed his fingers like an Italian.

“
I never gave those thousands of birds a lift in my car,” I said glumly. “That makes it personal.” I turned the radio louder to cover the thudding of panicked poultry. And my fiancé smiled patiently, not getting how horrified I was.

Being oblivious. Again.

Back at the apartment, I took off for the bedroom and shut the door while Jeannot labored in the kitchen twisting that poor bird’s neck. I guess I retreated into my art, drawing more “children’s stories.” And lo and behold, my newest “children’s story” featured a chicken.

The creature was trying to cross a road but finding the pavement too hot
. A great deal of chaotic flapping later, it got caught in a flock of birds immigrating south and this alien chicken found itself stuck inside a Florida swimming pool, sipping exotic-tasting chlorine for the rest of its life when what it really wanted was a bit of nice, boring homegrown grain.

Another whimsical tale for the depressed children o
f the world,
n’est-ce pas
?

When Jeannot opened the bedroom door to announce that my goose was cooked, I told him I didn’t feel well.

“Again?” he said, crossing to the bed. “
Chérie
, we really do need to find out if…”

“I know,” I said. “I will.”

“No period yet, correct?”

“Correct.”

“So…what are we waiting for? Why not buy a simple test? Or make an appointment with a doctor? I can get a referral for a woman if you prefer.”

“I’ll go to the pharmacy.”

“When?”

“Jeannot,
please
. Not right now, all right?”

He sighed and nodded and spied my sketchbook and flipped through the pages of the
sorry chicken story. For a while the silence between us seemed very, very thick. Then he said: “You know, you really are good. You must do something with your art.”

“Y
ou really think so? Despite the unhappy endings?”

“
Oui.
Despite your unhappy ending.”

“
I want to, if I'm not too old.”

He chuckled
. “You are never too old, according to a good friend of mine.”

Through the French doors in our bedroom, the
light had turned a lovely pale gold. I said, “What would you like to do tonight?”

“
Why? You want to go dancing?”

“Ha.”
I hated drunks in clubs. “I was thinking of something more relaxing.”

“What do
you have in mind? Dinner and a film?”

“In fact
, I was thinking of something even better. Like a massage.”

Jeannot nodded, the old smile rushing into his eyes.
“That would be super.”