Bird Read Free Page B

on the ridge.
    It was not sand that poured from Bird’s knees as she flew but a thousand tiny kites of herself, as dry and light as leaves. Mickey ran circles to catch them.
    They bedded down together—first night, the night they shimmied up the Brooklyn Bridge.
    He had a flask they drank from, a packet of junk to snort. He rode her home through the dark on her bicycle, Bird on her handlebars shaking, the wet of his breath on her back.
    â€œTurn here,” she said and he didn’t. He rode her to someplace he knew—a weedy patch on the riverbank, a dirty dark bar on Avenue B with songs he liked on the jukebox.
    Love, love will tear us apart, the song went.
    But it wouldn’t. But it already was.
    There was the way her back dimpled above the belt she wore and the heat of the way she smelled.
    There were her hands, which to Mickey looked borrowed. His hands were shaped like Bird’s hands. Their bodies fit together.
    They danced in the dim reach of the bar in the dance that is like lying together, half a song, the unholy swoon of new humans falling into each other. They would never be more lovely.
    When at last he rode Bird home on her bicycle, Mickey dumped it on a turn swinging off the bridge and they lay in the street laughing, gravel and a spatter of glass driven in under their skin.
    â€œI love you already,” she told him.
    A car made the turn and missed them.
    He said, “Oh, and I love you.”
    They had knocked the bike out of true and the wheel made a shh, a mother-sound, dependable as a heartbeat, all the way, all the way home.
    Go home , her boy wails when the snowman takes the child’s hand and flies north. Go home, go home, go home.
    He is talking in his sleep down the hall—something about a spoon he needs and one last ravioli—a dream that has lasted all night. For weeks of nights he dreamed his dream of a bad underwater deer.
    He’s a messy sleeper, Bird’s boy. He winds his sheet around his arms and feet and wakes himself by screaming: somebody tied him up. Or he’s up and asleep and walking. He is peeing in the freezer. He opens a drawer in his chest of drawers and pees on his just-laundered clothes.
    Bird’s husband is sleeping softly, his mouth crushed against his pillow. I choose you, she thinks, and moves in. A good man. Dog and hearth and children, the lucky, lucky life they have—a life her mother lived. I choose you.
    Fancy Man. She wants to smack him. She just could—for sleeping, say, while she isn’t. For shedding a hair on her pillow.
    So Mickey moved.
    So what?
    Thought to marry.
    And if he did?
    What if he went ahead and married and lived a life that looked a little like Bird’s life? Lived a lie, she wants to say—it’s not for him.
    Suppose it is: somebody else would be in it. PrairieLee. Victorine. Not you, Bird. It isn’t you, Bird: you’ve been married a dozen years.
    So why wake to the man, mussed by dreams, the old miserable pinch and burn? Why wake to Tuk and Doll Doll and driving the Drive Away out—that old saw, the only story of them she would tell?
    She used to tell the story to strangers, in a mood—tell it brightly, from a distance, her husband across the room.
    â€œThree days from Denver to Pueblo,” she said, “and then these two nuts in a Ryder truck—”
    She would catch her husband watching. Was he proud some? Proudsome, pleased? She thought so. Pleased with her and with the part he had played: he had signed her up, smoothed her out.
    Pleased and also sorry: had he not felt that, too?
    Hadn’t he wanted more of her, all the old somebody-elses she had been, the torn-apart feeling she hoards?
    She blows a spider from her husband’s cheek, a tiny golden fleck ascending its silver thread. Silver, the dew. The cows are eating windfall apples—beyond the window, beyond the sandbox and its rusting toys. Bird hung a swing in the tree—a rope with knots