The Bird Market of Paris (7 page)

After a year, Peter fired me from the pet store, blaming it on the manager, mumbling something about cutbacks. He didn't want me around anymore. He worked six days a week and liked to carouse with his pals on the weekends. I was underage and couldn't go to bars. Then I heard he'd bought a lovebird for another girl.

He came over during one of our big fights to take back his scuba equipment, which he kept in our garage because he liked to practice diving in the waterway behind our house. Before he arrived I put on every bit of his scuba equipment, from the wet suit to the flippers, hauled the heavy tanks onto my back, put the mask on my face, stuck the buoyancy compensator valve in my mouth, and did a penguin dance in front of the picture window as he thumped on the door, shaking my butt and wiggling my hips, flapping my feet around in a circle, flashing him my best jazz hands. I thought he'd laugh.

He kicked the door and his foot walloped through it, wood cracking and a panel of the door splintering at my feet. I flip-flapped in the black flippers like a terrified penguin toward the phone to call 911, but he reached through the hole in the door, unlocked it, rushed inside, and grabbed the phone from my hand, pulling the cord from the wall. I closed my eyes, waiting for a blow to the face or something equally furious; instead, he cried. He begged me to tell my parents that the cats whacked the foot-size hole in the door, but that was ridiculous. My parents demanded I never see him again. Poppy said if Peter wanted to speak with me, he would have to knock on the door with his foot—gently—because his arms would be so full of presents and flowers. Short of that, which wasn't going to happen, Peter was persona non grata.

I didn't want anything around that reminded me of Peter. I tossed or regifted everything he had ever given me, but I convinced myself that Bonk wasn't in any way associated with him. Bonk was a bird of my making, a creation of my love and attention, rarer than opals.

 

Chapter 6

“Morning, Bonk!” I sang, walking down the hall after I woke, whistling a catcall. That whistle was our “contact call,” a specific sound many species of birds repeat between partners or offspring to communicate location and well-being when the partner is out of sight. I was an honorary bird.

Bonk was almost two years old and I was nearly twenty, and we'd done this ritual since Bonk could catcall. After washing my face and brushing my teeth, I beelined for his cage to say good morning and feed and water him, whistling as I approached. This morning, Bonk didn't catcall back.

I found him crouched at the bottom of his cage, feathers fluffed and ruffled, hunched in a back corner. He didn't dance or beg to sit on my shoulder, wail to be let out, or rattle the cage door. I opened the cage and he hissed at me. He gaped his beak wide, black tongue waggling, and snapped at my hand.

I tried to coax him from the corner with a pen cap, but he hissed in short bursts, and fluffed his neck feathers, like a dog raises its hackles. I filled his food dish and that brought him out of the corner. There was a white oblong object at the bottom of the cage. Bonk ate a few seeds, then rushed back to the object and settled himself—no,
her
self—back onto it.

Bonk was a hen. Push me over with a feather.

Parrots, like chickens, can lay infertile eggs. Although no chick will ever hatch from an infertile egg, the bird is nonetheless protective of it. Bonk defended and warmed that infertile egg. Her life became centered on it, and she didn't want anything to do with me anymore.

How could she forget the relationship we had forged over the past two years, all those days of hand-feeding, the ruined shoelaces, our sitcom nights? Perhaps in the same way a doting mother doesn't want to lose a child to teenage-hood, I didn't want to lose my Bonk to an
egg
.

I had no idea what to do. Should I take her egg away? I considered that cruel, and she wouldn't let me near it anyway. On Tuesday, four days after Bonk laid her egg, I attended the monthly meeting of the Florida chapter of the Cockatiel and African Lovebird Society. We met inside a junior high school at eight in the evening and listened to lectures by local veterinarians, bird breeders, and genetics experts. Sometimes members prepared lectures on proper feeding, cage building, or hurricane preparation. Between twenty and thirty people showed up, all much older than myself, mostly retirees. I couldn't wait to tell them about the egg.

“Where's your little peachie?” asked Marge, the club's treasurer, a retired grandmother who bred lovebirds and cockatiels.

“Bonk had an
egg
,” I said, forming an egg shape with my fingers to show her how big it was.

“That's wonderful!” she said. “Now you can breed her. It's great to have a healthy egg-laying hen.”

“But she doesn't like me anymore.”

“She'll like you again as soon as you take away the egg.”

“She won't let me near it.”

“Let her sit on it for a week, then put on some gloves and take it away. In no time she'll be your buddy again. It's the same when they have babies.”

“Isn't that …
mean
?” I said.

“It's meaner to let her sit for weeks on an egg that won't hatch,” Marge said. “It's a waste of her time and takes away from her happiness. She'll never have a baby from an infertile egg, and that's got to be more frustrating than anything.”

Other group members suggested removing all paper material from Bonk, even the newspaper lining her cage. Shredding paper stimulates breeding behavior in lovebird hens. Bonk shredded any bit of paper in her reach—newspaper, paperback books, tissue boxes—into thin, identical strips, and stuffed them between the turquoise feathers of her rump. This is how peach-faced lovebirds transport nesting material. Male lovebirds don't do this, so it's a reliable way to tell the difference between genders. I must have been daydreaming in some of the bird society meetings, because I hadn't registered that before.

Poppy arranged to pick me up to spend the night with him and Nona that weekend, saying he had errands nearby. I don't think he had errands—he didn't want to worry about me on the road by myself. I was excited to show him the egg.

“She will not have a baby from that egg,” he said, bending at cage level to peer at Bonk as I lured her out of the corner with a wooden spatula.

“I know.”

“She might have more eggs.”

“I know.”

“She wants a boyfriend.”

“I know.”

“What do you
not
know,
Chérie
?”

“I don't know how to take it away from her.”

“Do you want my help?”

“I'm not ready,” I said.

He put his arm around my shoulder and we watched Bonk for a minute as she warmed her egg, eyeing us like a security guard.

“You are a good mother.”

We left, and it was the first time since I'd had Bonk that she didn't accompany me for a sleepover at Nona and Poppy's apartment. I was lonely without her.

I let the cranky, protective new “mom” pamper her single egg for well over a week. Then, with an acidic taste in my mouth and trembling hands, I slid on my mother's yellow dishwashing gloves.

I tiptoed to the cage and stood for a long time, watching Bonk. She huddled in the corner, crouched on top of her egg, watching me. It was a face-off, nose to beak.

Bonk rushed at me with her beak wide as I pulled the cage door open. I distracted her using a pencil and led her away from the egg. She bit the pencil eraser off and fought with the crimped silver ferrule. With my other gloved hand, I reached toward the egg and removed it from the cage.

Bonk hurried to the corner where her egg had been. She seemed disoriented for a minute, then hopped to her food dish and began munching the end off a carrot.

In the kitchen, I rested the warm egg on a bed of cotton balls in a plastic container and studied it. It looked like a miniature chicken egg, the same color and shape. Bonk's egg ranked among my prize possessions. I found clear nail polish in my mother's bathroom cabinet and sat at the kitchen counter and painted the egg so it would last. I placed her egg and its cotton-wad nest on a bookshelf in my room, high enough so Bonk wouldn't see it.

Bonk and I renewed our friendship, but I couldn't stop obsessing about the egg. Maybe Bonk needed a mate. I didn't want to breed her, but I did want her to have a companion, so I bought a black-masked lovebird.

Breeding the black-masked with the peach-faced lovebird would create a hybrid bird, often called a “mule” because they're infertile, a taboo in the bird community. I didn't intend on breeding the two birds, so I didn't give them a nest or any paper to shred. I named the new bird Baby. He had a striking black head, a body covered in blue hues ranging from sky to sapphire to royal, and a thick white collar around his neck like a nobleman in a Renaissance painting.

Baby was skittish and scrambled to the back of the cage when I put my hand inside to retrieve him, though once free from the cage he was happy to settle on my shoulder or fall asleep under my chin. When Bonk met Baby she ran at him, beak open, and dove for his toes to chomp them off. After a month there was no change in the behavior of either bird, so I bought a Fischer's lovebird and named him Smidge, a feisty red-beaked youngster who bit hard when he didn't get his way. He liked to bite my neck, and he didn't like Bonk or Baby at all. The three birds lived in the same room in separate cages for several months, with no interaction between any of them. Bonk laid more eggs.

So did Baby and Smidge.

I had three hens.

After another trip to a bird breeder's house with my parents, who had offered to buy me a few lovebirds, and two
more
females—now I had five lovebirds—I discovered how to make an educated guess about lovebird gender. Peach-faced and masked lovebirds are monomorphic, meaning that there are no real visible differences between the genders, but a knowledgeable lovebird keeper notices the subtle variances.

Female lovebirds are often larger than males, and have a feistier personality; the male's bone structure is finer and his personality is easygoing and gentle if he's tame. A female's hip bones, which can be felt by placing a finger on her vent (also called the cloaca, where feces is expelled), are wider and the bones are blunter than the male's, whose hip bones are often sharp and closer together.

I called Marge from the lovebird club and told her I wanted to find a mate for Bonk and not keep guessing about gender. I also told her I wanted a lutino male—bright yellow body with a red face—so the babies would hatch out pied. Pied was my favorite color mutation at the time, a lovebird with feathers of varying colors smattered onto one individual like a Jackson Pollock painting.

“That's not how it works, girl,” she said. “You can't put a green bird and a yellow bird together and come out with pied babies.”

“Green plus yellow doesn't equal pied?”

“There has to be pied in the bird's genetics. One of the parents has to be either pied or split to pied.”

I focused on finding a male, no matter the color mutation. Within a month, Bonk had accepted Binky, a year-old male peach-faced lovebird that looked like her.

I hung a wooden nest box in their cage, and a few weeks later Bonk laid five eggs. Each of those eggs was a revelation. I wanted to hold them, to witness the movements inside each moony shell. I spent a lot of time sitting by the cage, watching Bonk and Binky hop in and out of the wooden nest box, Binky feeding Bonk by regurgitating his food into her beak at the entrance to the nest as she warmed the eggs. Female lovebirds brood their eggs, unlike cockatiels and pigeons, who share egg-warming duties, though at night both lovebird parents will sleep inside the nest.

After a few weeks, peeping erupted from the nest, cheeping impossibly loud for a baby bird, amplified by the acoustics inside the wooden box. I shined a flashlight into the entry hole. Bonk backed into a corner, hissing, beak open, tongue wagging. I taunted her out of her box with a pen near the nest's hole, and when she hopped out to attack I saw a little pink coil wriggling on its back next to four eggs, a loud, wailing baby like Bonk had been, but pinker and wrigglier.

I called Poppy.

“Now I am a great-
great
grandfather,
Chérie
!” he said. “What are you doing to me? People will believe me to be much older than I am.”

Two more of Bonk's eggs hatched in the next few days. Watching the three babies grow was phenomenal, like watching a storm roll over the ocean. Every moment brought something new, a shift in color or pattern. They sat together in a green lump and scrambled away from me when I opened the box. I wanted to hold them, but Bonk wouldn't let me.

Bonk and Binky proved to be devoted parents. Binky fed Bonk, who returned inside to feed the chicks. About nine weeks after they hatched, the babies fledged, venturing from the box for short periods, and rushing back inside when I entered the room. A few weeks after that, Bonk wouldn't let them back into the nest, nipping them if they tried to squeeze through the round opening. She had laid another egg.

In the short time between Bonk finding her mate and her babies fledging from the nest, I collected more than thirty new lovebirds. I put them to nest, and hand-fed the two-week-old chicks so my babies would be tame. I built rough-looking flight cages and aviaries to house the babies. The world dissolved when I tended to the birds, and I wanted more of that feeling. I needed more birds.

 

Chapter 7

Until the age of twelve I had had both feet in Poppy's teetotaler camp, save the odd sips of wine or beer from an adult's glass, to taste. Sliding into thirteen, I'd had my doubts. What was the big deal? Drinking looked fun and grown-up, and I wanted nothing more than to be an adult. If I drank alcohol I'd grow up faster.