The Bird Market of Paris (4 page)

Poppy wanted us to release my birthday dove into the twilight, but that would signal my birthday ending and another year beginning, and my parents still weren't there. Nona spoke to her sister on the phone behind me in French, saying “the poor little one,” and tsking with her tongue.

“Not until they come home.”

“
Chérie
, if we do not set your dove free while there is still light in the sky, how will she find her way in the darkness?” He sat next to me and smoothed my frizzy hair.

I thought about that for a minute and followed him to the patio.

With the warm dove in my hands, I forgot about the window. I felt glorious and somehow holy, rising above the problems of my new nine-year-old world. I watched the dove ascend from my grasp, stutter in the air for a moment, then right itself and dive into the dusk, aiming for the moon.

We waved swarms of buzzing gnats away from our ears, silent together, until the first stars appeared. Before I could ask Poppy where my birthday dove went after she left my hands, he pointed to a patch of sky and said, “See that star? She is yours.”

The sky grew from plum to the color of crows, and I moved back to my perch at the window to wait for my parents. Disembodied headlights cruised down our block, and every time a quartz-halogen flash appeared, I would turn to the empty space behind me and yell, “They're home!” But it was never them. My arms tingled and grew numb, but I wouldn't leave the window.

“
La Petite
, come have a snack,” Nona said. She always called me
La Petite
, as Poppy called me
Chérie
.

“What time was I born?” I asked her.

She studied my face as if I were a chalkboard scribbled over with a complex physics formula. “Why do you want to know?”

“Because it's not my birthday until the time I was born, so if they come home before then, they won't miss my birthday.”

She contemplated me, then kissed my head and walked away. Again, I heard angry French whispers behind me, something about my parents and “the poor little one.”

“I understand you,” I said without turning around. I couldn't speak French, but I had good comprehension for simple conversations. They switched to speaking Arabic. I understood one phrase in the entire language:
bukra fil mish-mish
—when the apricots bloom—the Arabic version of our less delicate maxim “when pigs fly.”

Nona returned with a provolone sandwich and a cup of lentil soup, and I ate both, glaring into the darkness, wishing for cat vision and a magic wand.

When I finished eating, Nona brought me a wrapped box, bigger than anything I had received for any birthday, and said it was from her and Poppy. I couldn't believe how huge the box was, and it distracted me from the blankness outside. The box had to contain something great. I peeled the tape from the top of the box as Nona and Poppy stood over me.

“Rip it,
Chérie
,” Poppy urged. But I wasn't the ripping paper kind of kid. I was a saver. I peeled the tape until the paper fell away to reveal a big blue globe, the curves of its body breaching the colorful box through circular openings on four sides, as if the globe wanted to force its way out of the packaging.

“This is so you can see the world,” Nona said.

With Poppy's help, I removed the globe from the box and placed it on the coffee table. He spun the globe on its tilted axis.

“Here is Egypt,” he said, fingering a purple country tattooed with the blue Nile, a snake winding through the desert, forming a shape like a distended stomach with an outie belly button. “You see, here, Heliopolis, where your daddy was born, and Cairo, where we lived.
Chérie
, now you find Greece.”

I peered around Europe and turned the globe, but Poppy put his hand on mine. He placed his finger below an orange country and a group of orange islands speckling the turquoise sea.

“Show her Corfu,” Nona said.

Poppy's finger roamed up the coast of Greece. “There is no Corfu.”

“No Corfu!” Nona exclaimed. “What did they do with Corfu?”

“They omitted it,” Poppy said, peering at the spot where Corfu should have been, surrounded by the blue waters of the Ionian Sea.

“What kind of world doesn't have Corfu?”

“It must still be there. We would have seen on the news if it sank into the sea.”

Nona tsked with her tongue and walked into the kitchen, her clear plastic flip-flops
ca-chuck ca-chucking
with each step. Poppy's finger traveled again, tracing the forty-five-degree line of longitude, and landed on a green country.

“Look here,
Chérie
.” I squinted at the globe as he tapped on a small black star in northern France. “Paris. The best city in the world. We will go there someday together.”

I pulled the globe into my lap and spun it, tracing my finger over bumpy mountain ranges, outlining continents, traversing oceans in seconds. I inspected Paris, then Miami. I wished I were in Paris, away from this birthday failure. I glanced at the time on Poppy's watch. Almost nine o'clock.

“What time was I born?” I asked Poppy.

He smoothed my hair again. “I do not know,
Chérie
. That is a good question. Ask your mommy when she comes home.”

I hoped I wasn't born until just before midnight. That would give my parents time to arrive before my birthday ended. I set the globe aside, turned back to the window, and glared into the darkness.

At ten o'clock, Nona brought me a slice of birthday cake. It had a hole in the top where a candle had been. I ate it slowly, face framed inside the window. Passing strangers would see a girl eating cake, and I wondered if they'd know it was my birthday.

By half past ten, Nona and Poppy had convinced me to change into my nightclothes, brush my teeth, and try to sleep. They said I would hear when my parents arrived. Nona sat on our queen-size bed and we ate cherry Pop Rocks, giggling like two girls at a slumber party at how the candy sizzled on our tongues. She kissed me good night and shut the door behind her. We didn't always go to bed at the same time.

“See you tomorrow!” I trilled after her, as I did every night, feeling that if she didn't say it back she might die in her sleep. I saved her with this ritual each evening, though she didn't know it. I'd badger her if she didn't say it back, trailing behind her with my blue security blanket, BaaBaa, dragging on the floor until she relented, said the magic phrase, and ferried me back to bed.

“See you tomorrow,” Nona replied, voice muffled through the door.

Crickets and cicadas serenaded one another over our lawn, an unrelenting wall of sound mingled with the soft whoosh of the areca palm's fronds teasing the breeze outside my window. Passing cars didn't stop, one after another, at what seemed like regular intervals, shining their lights between the cracks in my curtains, slinging shadows around the room like a magician throwing cards into a hat. I held the last wrapped party favor, squishing the paper around the surprise gift. I knew the contents by process of elimination, but this last present gave me hope. My birthday wasn't over. It wasn't midnight, was it?

I unwrapped one layer of the party favor gift and set aside the crumpled paper. Then I peeled another layer. If I peeled slowly enough, I'd hear a car engine whine into the driveway. Peel. It would stop and I'd hear two car doors open, then slam shut. Peel. Then footsteps toward the front door. Peel. Keys in the front door. Peel. Door open with a squeak. Peel. Door shut. Peel. Parents walking to my room. Peel. The door opening. Peel. A yellow triangle of light shafting onto the floor toward my bed. Peel. “Happy birthday!” Peel.

Then it was in my hands, a fuzzy bunny statuette. I couldn't see it in the darkness, but I could feel its velvety ears and smooth nose. I raised it to my face and rubbed it along my cheek, then scrunched into my pillow and pulled the sheet over my head, crunchy, rumpled paper falling onto the floor. I wedged the bunny into the crook of my neck, where I found it in the morning.

I smelled Nona's breakfast through the crack in the door: potatoes and sardines frying,
koulourakia portokaliou
, my favorite orange-flavored cookies, baking in the stove with fresh pita bread, and the slimy but delicious green
molokhia
soup already boiling for lunch. I winced at the sun through a sliver in the yellow curtains and wondered if my birthday dove was safe. For the first time in all my birthdays I regretted releasing her. It might have been the first time I felt regret at all. I didn't feel nine. I felt endless, like I filled all the space in the universe, and like I took up no space at all.

 

Chapter 4

When I was thirteen and in seventh grade, my parents and I moved from Nona and Poppy's home to our own house in Coconut Grove on Royal Palm Avenue. The house was set back from the street, shaded by wild trees no gardener ever tended, with a colossal banyan tree in the front that had to be a hundred years old, its gangly roots reaching for the ground like Rapunzel's penny-colored mane. I'd braid the roots and swing over the pebbled driveway like Tarzan. A sinkhole on the property filled with rainwater during storms, and I'd toss pebbles into the mysterious chasm, wondering how deep it went, and if it would someday swallow the house. I had my own room, and I snuck into the neighbor's yard to swim in their pool when they weren't home. I liked our new digs, but Poppy had to drive nearly an hour in traffic to pick me up for weekends with him and Nona.

“Does your daddy ever smoke funny cigarettes?” Poppy asked me one day as he drove me west in his silver Honda hatchback.

My dad was a five-pack-a-day Marlboro Red chain-smoker. He always had a cigarette in his hand, even in photographs from before I was born. Nicotine perfumed every crevice of the house, cleaved to the back of every breath. I was probably a pack-a-day smoker from secondhand smoke.

Nona had smoked for forty years, too, a constant cloud of cigarette fumes anointing her head like a nicotinic halo, but she quit in her sixties, then sat on the couch every day after she retired watching
Days of Our Lives
and
General Hospital
, cracking sunflower seeds. Instead of ashtrays overflowing with cigarette butts all over the house, they overflowed with a deluge of crunchy black shells.

But Poppy was referring to the thin rolled cigarettes my dad and some of his friends smoked. These were the cigarettes blowing by me at dinner parties, passed from adult to adult, a tiny Olympic torch with a hypnotic burning ember at the tip.

“Funny cigarette” plants grew in our backyard and on our roof in a homemade greenhouse built with pine stakes and opaque plastic panels. On sunny afternoons, when the western sun hit the panels, the dark silhouettes of dozens of plants shimmied in the breeze, like a crowd of people with hundreds of flickering hands. My dad had been cultivating a healthy urban “funny cigarette” farm for years. He called them his “tomato plants,” though they never bore any tomatoes. Sometimes he'd have me turn on the faucet outside that propelled water through the irrigation system to the plants on the roof. They grew taller than I was, wild and pretty, the color of a praying mantis. My dad would harvest the plants and leave the crop in sticky, fragrant piles drying all over the house on oilcloth tarps. My parents had been batik-wearing, daisy-carrying hippies in the 1960s; of course there were “funny cigarettes” around.

“You have never seen any funny cigarettes?” Poppy asked again. “What about your daddy's friends, do they smoke funny cigarettes?”

Saying
yes
would ignite an investigation. I insisted I didn't know anything about the funny cigarettes.

My dad was a manager at the Ferrari and Porsche Collection in Miami, and my mom sold cars at the Subaru and Saab Collection. This was the 1980s, when every other car on the Miami streets was a shiny, expensive import.

My mom or dad picked me up from junior high every day in a different fancy car belonging to one of their dealerships. Every afternoon, boys from school waited outside the building to see what make and model of car would roll up. Maybe today it would be a Rolls-Royce Silver Cloud, a Porsche 911, or a Ferrari Mondial. I had the reputation of being a drug dealer's kid. I knew a few kids whose parents
were
drug dealers, children of people who bought cars from my dad, kids I had playdates with on weekends. They had tigers and bubbly Jacuzzis and waterfalls cascading into their giant pools and projection TVs in their mammoth living rooms. The closest I had to a tiger was Sylvester, the black and white stray kitten I had plucked from a box in front of Publix. We didn't have a projection TV. We didn't even have a bathtub.

My parents entertained guests several times a week, someone from the Ferrari dealership, or patrons from a local bar, the Taurus, where my parents often drank after work. They took me to the Taurus with them, but they wouldn't let me sit at the bar, a seat I desperately wanted. The bar was the nexus of activity, bordered by a hedgerow of mysterious off-limits bottles handled by a man of authority, who plucked them with confidence from their seats in front of a backlit mirror. People entreated the guardian of the bottles to give them a small portion of the liquid contents, some of which smelled of oranges, chocolate, or licorice. I wanted to taste them all. Instead, I'd end up in a back room playing Ms. Pac-Man for hours at a cocktail sit-down machine opposite one of my dad's friends, the folksinger Fred Neil, who wrote “Everybody's Talkin',” the theme song for the film
Midnight Cowboy
.

I liked my dad's work friends—like Louie, the good-natured Cuban car salesman who had three daughters around my age whom I played with when we vacationed together in Marco Island, on Florida's west coast—but I resented my parents' bar friends, the men I called the “couch drunks.” They'd sleep on our couch for months at a time and keep my parents up all night drinking, and they'd be there in the morning as I padded to the bathroom to brush my teeth. One of them drank my dad's cologne.