Simple lives, used to be. Homesteaders, sheepherders.
School bus coming prettily — you can’t hear it yet — up the road. You scoot her out. Not a sign, no way in the world to stop it.
But you’re the mother.
You are the one who is supposed to know.
The baby hooks Bird’s lip with her finger: the baby wants Bird to sing. So she sings: little snowflake, white shell, that one. And kisses all ten toes. Bird counts her lucky stars to eleven and quits. Thinks: quit while you can and hide them, woman. The gods are greedy, too.
She cranks the music, dances the baby upstairs. It helps. A little sunshine helps. Dewfall soon. She ought to walk back out without shoes. Pass her toes through the early glittery wet, the grass with its sparky dew.
Sparky—that’s her boy’s word.
Count of three. Look both ways twice.
Now move on.
Take a picture.
“Hey, hey, Mama. Take a little one of me.”
“It’s a little bit, it’s a little bit, it’s a little bit hot,” her boy says.
And drops his pants from the bridge.
“Hey, take a little one of me.”
What to do? Lock your babies in a closet in the dark all day and slide rice under the door? Keep them out of the sun, keep the wind from their eyes, keep them off the country road. From TV, keep them, and victorious boys, heroes hoisting the flag. From the man in a hood with the white of his palms opened skyward, wired, by head and foot and hand. From that. The next war, war to end all wars, first war of the brand new century, the unrelenting brassy gong. The poor pagans, the un- and under-chosen, the great sweeping cry to arms. To Swords! Face the Nation. From that, keep them. From the static of indecision. From desire and the absence of desire. The fly in the web that does itself in by flying. By tattered wings, by tiny dry ambitions. From that, keep them. From me, Bird thinks — goer-between, meddler. Damp consoling shade.
She could write a letter, fat chance. Scrub commodes. Here’s that respite, the solitary hours — before suppertime, before the school bus comes. What to do, what to do. Try the treadmill — right.
“You’d feel better,” says her husband, says Suzie.
“Better than what?” Bird says.
“You think I’m fat?” she asked her boy. “You think Mama’s too fat?”
He looked her over.
“To do what?”
The baby’s arms swing up, silly baby, asleep: she thinks she is falling out of a tree.
Bird washes a fork. Pays a bill and walks it to the mailbox. Comes back and picks up the phone. She won’t answer, Bird thinks, but Suzie answers.
“Your poet?” Bird asks.
“Elsewhere. He went out for chips and beer.”
“And he’s behaving? You’re okay?”
“You worry too much.”
“It’s a habit. It’s a reason for living.”
“Ah, that one,” Suzie says.
“You’ll see.”
“Bet you five bucks I’ll never.”
“What?”
“You’ve been drinking, Bird. I hear it. You’ve been thinking and it isn’t good. The world’s done for. We’ve trashed the planet. There won’t be water when your babies are grown.”
“I can’t help it.”
“Sugar, you have to. Walk.”
“I just did.”
“Do it again. Get out. Try dancing. Make Doctor Said So keep the babies and go out and have a high time. I’ll set you up, sugar. It’s Italian you want, you want a Frenchman? In a heartbeat, with that hair of yours, I could find you a classy Latin. Why not? Dance a little, sugar. Let him sweat on you. Let him back you into the back of the room.”
“Enough.”
“Enough?” Suzie laughs. “It’s almost nothing.”
“I don’t know why I called,” Bird says.
“You’re drunk, is why. And you’re lonesome. You want someone to say his name to, but you won’t, not even to me.”
“It’s easy for you. You talk to him.”
“I do what I want. That’s me. You’re afraid to want anything. You say his name and the scenery goes to pieces. What I think? You should get in your car and find him. Leave your babies. Go to him. Find out who he still is. He’s in—”
“Cut it out, Suzie Q. Don’t tell me.”
“Why not? He’s in church next door in his underpants. He’s in Ushuaia, look it up, where I saw him last, at the far away tip of the world.”
“You loved him, too, don’t forget.”
“Fool me once,” Suzie says, “many years ago.”
“That worked nicely.”
“Don’t gloat,” Suzie says. “I wanted sunshine.”
“You wanted Mickey. A kitchen sink and a gingham apron. A patch of grass to mow.”
“I’ll let you go now, Bird. I’m going.”
“You wanted to make little red-haired babies!”
“The one time and never again.”
Mickey wouldn’t move and then he got to moving. Bird went west with him and south, a long way around, and when they came back around to Brooklyn, Mickey looked south again. He wanted out, skip the gray.
We’re soon over, said the note.
He said he was going alone. He went with Suzie.
Suzie spelled him driving south; it was winter. He had bought a car that mostly worked. His radio worked and the windows, all but one. He liked to drive in the heat with the windows down.
He would want a little place, Suzie guessed. Something. A week in a clean soft bed.
But he didn’t. He had his car he thought to sleep in. He found a boat sloshed up from a hurricane he could tack a lean-to on.
“So I’m home,” Suzie called Bird.
It was sleeting. Suzie needed a ride from the bus stop, she had tossed out her winter coat.
“That was useful,” Bird told her, digging. “You didn’t like the sun?”
Sun and wind and shadow. A boy on a swing. The grasses golden.
But the days went gray in Denver and cold and they were grounded now, evened out, and Bird’s jaw had begun to stiffen. She couldn’t talk much; she didn’t want to.
The Drive Away clerk went north again — the forecast for old Cheyenne was windy, windy and blue.
They’d go south. South for the heat and sunshine: Nogales, Cuernavaca, La Paz. Eat peyote and sweat with the Mexicans, clear the cobwebs out.
Bird had an aunt in Albuquerque — they could stay a little while with her. She would float them a loan if they asked right and pulled her weeds in the back lot and heated her enchiladas. They’d plant hollyhocks. They would walk her dogs and pick up after them and Bird’s aunt would lend them a car for a day, so Bird could show Mickey around. That’s the room I shared with my sisters, Mickey. There’s the tree house. The ditch where we swam. We had horses. Here’s where my rabbit is buried.
“Hoppy?” Mickey said. “Say you’re kidding.”
“Why?”
“I’m making the rounds with a lunkhead who named her rabbit Hoppy? Not even Hopsalong? Not Floppy?”
He was kidding, but then he wasn’t. They were in a pancake joint and he was loud.
“So what?” Bird asked.
“So what?” Mickey asked. “We nearly married. We made a baby almost. Remember? What did you think to call her?”
“Mickey, stop,” Bird said, “please.”
But he was started.
“You think it doesn’t matter, what you name a thing? Crazy Horse was Curly. When Crazy Horse became Crazy Horse, his father took the name Worm. You think that doesn’t matter?”
He jabbed a waffle with his fork and went at the rim.
“I had an aunt named Alice, my mother’s sister, I could talk to like I never talked to Mother. She had a freckle behind her ear I loved. All over, she had them all over, but that was the one I loved. She liked white food — asparagus, raspberries, cream. It was tenderer, she said, white asparagus. It made your mind clear. White food purified your thoughts. She had no children. Her skin was so white it was blue. She jumped horses. She got her foot hung up in the stirrup one day and was dragged across a field and trampled. Her skull was split. I wanted to see her. I wanted to see what her mind looked like — how clear it was, how true. Auntie Alice. My mother gave me a little pouch of her ashes. I was kid. I wet my finger and dipped it in there. White food. I ate it one flake at a time.”