Books by DAR

Small Family With Rooster

Excerpts: How Birds Sleep

She had already come at him with a knife and fork, and he had already swatted her in the eye, and she had already ripped his best pastel portrait of her in half, and he had already held her down on the floor till they both cried. Now, at 2 A.M., there was nothing they could do but take a walk. They looked at each other with all of their love that had backfired, and they could not cry anymore, and they could not smile, either, and they got up from the floor and walked down the circular staircase to the sidewalk.

This all took place a long time ago. They lived in a dorm. Outside the dorm, life seemed to have deserted them. Only the night was there: white clouds streaming past the moon. Tiny cold birds filled the trees, silent, watchful, and everyone in the college was sleeping as Seamus and Maggie stood rooted, utterly paralyzed as to which way to walk.

“I’ll kill myself.”

“Don’t keep telling me that, Maggie.”

“You bastard.”

“I’m not a bastard, Maggie.”

Finally they turned to the left and began to walk in the middle of the road.

It must have rained earlier because Thayer Street had a black gloss with white streaks in it where light from the street lamps had pooled up. Dim light came also from the closed shop windows across the street, but on the other side were only darkened windows, separate student windows with sleeping lovers inside: people trying so hard to drum up attachments to other people that when it came time to detach, they found the other people were in their fingernails and their cuticles and even in the backs of their throats and the pits of their stomachs.

Seamus thought he was going to be sick again.

“Don’t be sick again, Seamus. Oh, honey. Darling.”

Seamus stopped walking and closed his eyes and seemed to be breathing with his scalp. He reached out and took hold of one of Maggie’s belt loops for balance.

They resumed walking. Seamus tried not to look sideways at the legs of his girlfriend in their forest-green tights because he pitied them. He had loved them for three years and now for no reason he pitied them and did not want to see them anymore. For no reason except that it was over.

“Please talk to me,” she said, her face steaming with hope. “I want a conversation. All you give me is remarks.”

“All I have is remarks.”

“But you have conversations with other people.”

Seamus seemed to be breathing for two. He looked at the face of his first love and wondered why his very core felt pinched by her radiance, why those same lovely blond looks that had beckoned to him so passionately for three years were now suffocating to him. Why for three years he had worshipped the icy vapor that seemed to twirl off her eyes, virgin-blue like the Popsicles she loved, until the vapor disappeared, the eyes became cactus-blue, flat and empty of mystery. It was impossible to defend himself when he was as lost for answers as she was. He wiped a spot of rain from his temple, summoning his energy.

“What would you like to do?” he asked. “Would you like a snack at the Ivy Room? Would you like a Popsicle? They’ve got real fruit Popsicles made of juice instead of water in the Ivy Room. Or an ice-cream sandwich? Are you hungry?”

“Is the Ivy Room open?”

“Oh,” said Seamus, turning and looking with renewed disappointment at the blackened windows of the building that housed the Ivy Room. “The Ivy Room must have

closed hours ago.”

“See, you leave me with an empty feeling,” Maggie said, picking at the heel of her shoe, which had come unglued hours before. “May 1 say this as a friend? Can we forget everything for a minute and will you just understand when I say –”

“What?”

Maggie waved her hands-never mind. Never mind. Never mind.

They turned left on George Street. They were so weary of battling each other all day and night that they walked up the middle of the road bumping into each other.

“Not so much an empty feeling,” Maggie said at last, “as a feeling that everything was given to me and now everything has been ripped away. Like your pastels. All your artwork leaves the same feeling.”

Seamus was about to ask her why then for Cod’s sake wouldn’t she let him leave, but she waved her hands again. Never mind.

Earlier, in the bright daylight of noon, he had tried physically running from her. He had run across the Green and hid behind the statue of Marcus Aurelius. Then, after she had broken her heel finding him, he had tried running again and locking himself in his room, but she had sat in the public courtyard below and had called up to his window.

“Don’t you know we love each other,” she had called, “and that this break-up is wrong? And I don’t care who hears. Breaking up is really wrong. I don’t want to ask you anymore . . . but nights will be bad! I’m so scared, Seamus, I hate to say please, or to beg-but I think we are wonderful together. I love you very much and I don’t ever want you to forget it, no matter what happens. I love you in my sleep! I love you more! I love you so much I could cry . . . with happiness!”

Then she had begun to weep about how birds sleep and Seamus had come down and opened the door for her pitiful snot-faced child. That was not how she wanted to be remembered, was it? As an orphan, a war orphan or worse, a love orphan with no one to turn to, nobody to care for her, least of all herself? But she didn’t care. She didn’t care. She wanted Seamus to be so close that he didn’t care, either.

Now, under the wet sycamore trees of George Street, Maggie said, “I’m so sleepy, Seamus, but I don’t want to sleep. I don’t want to be ignorant of what I feel. I’m going to do something bad, Seamus, I feel that I’m close to doing something awful to myself.”

“Sweetheart, there’s nothing I can do to stop you.”

“What do you mean, you can’t stop me? Don’t you care?”

“I care.”

“Then do something.”

“Like what?”

Maggie turned on him again. “Love me!” she screamed– and tore at his ears, his hair, his cheeks, spitting and flailing like a madwoman. Seamus was stronger. He pinned her arms behind her and held her legs between his like a vise. “Ow,” she whimpered – and, as he expected, tried to bash upward with her knee.

Suddenly she was down in a street puddle on both knees, clasping his thighs and burying her tears in his groin. “I’m sorry, I’m sorry, I’m sorry,” she whispered reverently. “Oh, tell him not to go,” she prayed, as though to an icon. “Tell him not to leave me. You don’t want to leave me, do you?”

Seamus struggled to get her to stand.

“No, no, no,” she whispered. Then shrieked: “What do you want to do with other girls? What is it you want to do?” And she postulated a number of desperate things that Seamus had never expected to hear from the mouth of his first love. Then she began to sob again, shaking and suffering, and Seamus had to stand there in the empty street for some time with two arms around his legs. They had the dripping sycamore trees to themselves, with the salty breeze blowing off the bay. They were all alone.

There were things, Seamus realized, things in the world you should not do. Things you had to avoid doing. Take a duckling from its mother was one of the things you should avoid doing at all cost – for if you handled a duckling and then tried to give it back to its mother, the mother would peck it to death. I don’t know why the mother would do that, Seamus thought – she just would. Or leave a pet rabbit outside in its cage so that a dog barked at it. If you let a caged rabbit get barked at, even if it was perfectly safe in its cage, it would begin to shake and shake and pretty soon it would drop over dead.

Why is that?

I don’t know.

Could you hold a butterfly by its wings?” Seamus tried to remember. No, he decided, standing in the street with the salty breeze blowing off the bay – that was another thing you bad to beware of: the butterfly would hereafter lose its ability to fly.

How many things were there to avoid doing in the world?

Hard to say. At least two hundred.

Give milk to a stray kitten?

Oh, yes.

Sleep with a virgin?

Oh, yes. That was one of the two hundred. You had to be extremely careful not to give milk to a stray kitten, or sleep with a virgin. You had to leave stray kittens and virgins alone to do whatever they bad to do by themselves. You had to take no part. You had to be restrained – more restrained than you ever knew you bad to be. When you were born, you never knew bow restrained you bad to be. When you were ten, you never knew it. But if you did not know it by the time you were twenty, Seamus thought, you’d be one of the lucky oafs who never knew.

Seamus looked down at Maggie, with her head up in supplication, her eyes closed, her face dreamy with awe, her forest-green tights getting sopped in the puddle and

one shoe broken at the heel.

“Tell me again how birds sleep?” he heard her ask.

Seamus helped her to stand. He put his arms around her and turned them both left onto Brown Street, where paper notices for roommates rustled damply from their thumbtacks on the tree trunks.

“Birds have tendons,” Seamus began, “that run from their feet right over their knees. When birds are tired, and they begin to slump, their knees bend and pull the tendons taut, making the claws in their feet clench. That’s how birds can sleep standing up, clinging to branches and telephone wires without falling off.”

They walked under glistening branches. Swollen beads of water dripped around them from on high like lazy bombs.

“You mean as the bird gets drowsier and heavier, its body works to fasten it on even better,” Maggie said. “I love that idea.”

Seamus was crying silently, but he didn’t let her see.

“Is it my turn to tell you how birds sleep?” she asked him.

Seamus didn’t say anything for a minute. Then he coughed to cover his tears.

“It’s ingenious,” Maggie said. “Birds have these tendons . . .”

How did they do it, again?

How they did it, see, was that Maggie would burst into tears while they were making love. A hundred times she would burst into tears of joy or yearning-deeply ancient sobs of trust as be continued to press upward-and afterward she would sigh and smile and ask him to tell her the story again. It was her favorite story to listen to and to tell back to him. Lying there with her tears drying on his shoulder, a hundred times she would listen to bow the tendons would tighten with the birds’ body weight, pulling the claws tighter. An ingenious idea. Therefore the deeper the birds slept, the tighter their claws would cling. A mythical idea. She would kiss him then, a hundred times. And then she would fall asleep, dreaming that she was a bird, slumping into him, bolding him tighter as she slept.

Softly, after a few minutes in the darkness of Brown Street, Seamus loosened her grip on his arm. And after another few minutes Maggie softly said, “Do you understand why I have to kill myself?”

“Tell me,” Seamus said.

“Because I don’t ever want to get over you. I don’t ever want time to heal the wound.”

“You know that’s what would happen?”

“Indeed,” Maggie said. “That’s the scariest thing of all. It means 1 can’t even trust myself to go on hurting . . .”

Maggie breathed evenly, in and out. “I’m very lucid right now. I know not everyone gets destroyed over something like this. They change. It’s amazing how easily they change. They wait awhile and sooner or later they fall out of love and fall in love with someone else, and sleep with them, and forget all about how birds sleep.”

“It’s amazing how they heal,” Seamus agreed.

“I have to kill myself to keep that from happening. I never want to be that fickle.”

“Change isn’t fickleness,” Seamus said.

“Yes, it is,” Maggie said calmly. “That’s exactly what it is. And you’re not such a bastard that you don’t know it, too. “

Seamus snapped off a piece of watery twig as they continued walking. He pressed it to his lips.

“I guess I’m willing to take my chances,” he said.

“I guess you are,” Maggie said. “What do you care, if one day your heart and soul stand for one thing, and the next day it’s all backward, and your heart and soul stand for something else . . . “

“lt’s bad to fall out of love,” Seamus admitted. “But it’s not bad enough for me to kill myself.”

“No one’s asking you to kill yourself, Seamus.”

“No?”

“I hope your next girlfriend dies,” Maggie said then. “If that’s what you want – to be free to see other girls, to marry someone else someday – go ahead, and I want her

to die. And I hope your children die, too-in a tidal wave! I hope they die by drowning – like I am right now.”

Suddenly she turned to him in a kind of rapture.

“Please let’s just go and kill ourselves,” she begged, pulling the skin around her eyes tight so the blue eyeballs bulged forth. “Please let’s just go back to your room and wrap our legs around each other and not say another word and just do it. Don’t leave me! Don’t leave me! Or give me a baby so I can kill myself and be together with your baby inside me forever! Oh, Seamus, Seamus, am I desperate?” she wailed, from a faraway pulsating place. “Is this what it feels like to lose the whole world?”

Seamus stopped walking. They were on the street in front of Andrews House, the infirmary.

“Stay here,” he told Maggie. “Or come inside, if you want. But I have to see a doctor.”

He seemed to be having trouble breathing again.

“Are you all right?” Maggie asked.

“I need to talk to someone.”

“Oh,” she said, pausing. “Not me?”

“Not you.”

“I adore you, Seamus.”

“I know that, darling.”

Radiant with despair, Maggie sat on a nearby stone bench and began to pick at her heel again.

Seamus climbed the two marble steps to the door and pressed the night bell beside the heavy iron-and-glass door. After a long moment the door was pulled open by a nurse wearing such white clothes Seamus had to squint. It felt like many hours or days since he had seen a human being so bright.

“Is there a doctor on call?” Seamus asked.

“Did you hurt your eyes?’’

“Someone’s going to kill herself. Is there a doctor on call?”

The nurse turned crisply and scrambled ahead, gesturing him to sit in the waiting room. Presently a tall man came in wearing a white flannel jacket, also so very bright and gentle he seemed to have just been awakened from a dream or emerged from a blizzard. Seamus thought he was in the presence of Eskimos or angels, so grateful was he for company. But he knew that all they were were other people. It seemed so long.

Wet, disheveled, Seamus sat there in the presence of this doctor, and he poured out to him what was going on: how he had once loved Maggie, how he was hurting her, how he had picked up a butterfly by its wings and taken a duckling from its mother and given milk to a stray kitten and now – worst of all the two hundred things – how he was not letting birds sleep, maybe never letting them sleep again . . . because he was a bastard.

“You’re not a bastard,” the doctor said.

“I don’t love her anymore,” Seamus explained.

“You’re not a bastard. “

“I’m forcing her to kill herself,” he insisted.

“How do you know she’ll kill herself?”

“I know.”

The doctor looked away. When he looked back at Seamus, incredibly, his eyes were moist. With the gentlest voice ever, the doctor said the toughest words ever:

“How dare you?”

And he was right-Seamus ought never to have presumed such a thing about a person. For the next half hour Seamus thought hard about that, as he went back outside and collected Maggie and they finished their walk. The whole next day he thought hard about it, as he drove her the hundred miles to her home and dropped her off in her driveway and backed away from her small screaming figure and left. Four months later he thought hard about it, when Maggie married a boy she’d known in high school, the son of an auto-parts magnate; and four yean later, when she had her first set of twin boys; and fourteen years later, when she ran successfully for assistant district attorney on the Republican ticket in a large city in upper New York State. It’s amazing –

What is?

– how people don’t die.