Heberlein, L A

English

UAB Digital Commons (Univ. of Alabama at Birmingham)

Astarte Volume 6 Article 20 1999 Bird on the Wire L A. Heberlein Follow this and additional works at: https://digitalcommons.library.uab.edu/astarte  Part of the Creative Writing Commons, and the English Language and Literature Commons Recommended Citation Heberlein, L A. (1999) "Bird on the Wire," Astarte: Vol. 6, Article 20. Available at: https://digitalcommons.library.uab.edu/astarte/vol6/iss1999/20 This content has been accepted for inclusion by an authorized administrator of the UAB Digital Commons, and is provided as a free open access item. All inquiries regarding this item or the UAB Digital Commons should be directed to the UAB Libraries Office of Scholarly Communication. Bird on the Wire Joy is coming, and I am frightened. We have not slept beneath the same roof in five years, and there is no reason for me to care what she feels for me now, but still she has the power to make me wonder if the sandwich bread is the right texture, to send me scurrying back to the corner store four times for more kinds of soft drinks. I started with Fruitopia and Odwalla, about ten bottles because I couldn't pick between Mango Madness and Guava-Strawberry whatever, but by the time I got home I thought they're all probably too sweet for her now, though they would not have been for the child I knew. So I went back to the store for plain carbonated water, but that somehow seemed so empty, I went back again for a bottle of wine, but even before I got back to the loft I remembered her mother, realized that Joy at twenty would still have an attitude about alcohol, one way or the other, and so I went back again for bottled tea. I was remembering, standing there stock-still on the sidewalk, on West 42nd St., distracted woman in the way on the sidewalk, bumped by a tourist and then jostled by a hefty Russian-looking man in an overcoat, the day fifteen years ago, on the way to Horace Mann kindergarten in Beverly Hills, El told Joy I was moving to Seattle also when the two of them moved back there. "Oh, that's great," Joy said, clapping her little hands together in front of her face. "We'll get one of those Craftsman bungalows by Green Lake," El said, riffing on the fantasy the way he always would. "Remodeled with a huge third story for Ollie to paint in." Joy's face squeezed together. "She's not going to live with us!" The look on her face, the sound in her voice, it wasn't terror, because she was incapable of being threatened in that place. It wasn't scorn, because she was not a scornful person. It was disbelief. It was that she was sure we grownups had got confused in the telling, because she understood the story, and the story wasn't like that at all. 33 1Heberlein: Bird on the WirePublished by UAB Digital Commons, 1999The story was that I was going to move to Seattle, too, and get a studio there like my studio in downtown Los Angeles, and come over to visit on Fridays, and spend the night, and have pancakes with her on Saturday morning, and then go away and leave her to play with her dad. In truth, it was a lot like that. On the weekends that Joy was with us in Seattle, I did spend all Saturday in my studio. It wasn't to avoid Joy. It was because when the two of them were together, I might as well not be there. I could speak whole paragraphs and never be heard. I could have doused myself with turps and set myself on fire. If they happened to be building something out of old shoeboxes with their backs to me, they would not hear the rush of flames, or, hearing something, not tum around to see what had happened. We went to Cyndy, Geoffry, Carlene, and Emily. Emily four years. We were in that step-parents' group at King County Health. We took three parenting courses. I bought enough books, I bought enough books to fill that orange bookshelf by the back stairs. My relationship with El was not only the best relationship I've ever had in my life, it was the best relationship any of my friends had. After I was with him a few years, they were all looking for a guy just like him. He would talk about anything. Sure, he'd put up some resistance at first, bluster and blow a little, but then as soon as you got past that -and it didn't take much to get past that -he'd come to me alone in a still place with nothing on it and we could just talk straight across with no twists or bends or pressure. I always felt heard by him in that place. We just couldn't get to that place when Joy was there. When Joy was there, he didn't even make eye contact with me. I would be answering a question he asked me, and if Joy came up and interrupted, he wouldn't even acknowledge that it was an interruption, he'd just tum and take whatever she was handing him and the two of them would go racing off withut a look back, my sentence unfinished and unremembered. 34 2Astarte, Vol. 6 [1999], Art. 20https://digitalcommons.library.uab.edu/astarte/vol6/iss1999/20She was a dear child, beautiful, smart, and good-natured. But she was just a little kid. She wasn't god. She wasn't his soul. She was not his salvation, his hope, his reason for drawing breath. Only she was. When she would leave, when her mom would pick her up Sunday night, El would close the door, turn the deadbolt, and slide down the inside of the door, sitting against the door with his eyes closed, sometimes with tears on his cheeks, sometimes with huge fat sobs. He would beat himself up for a couple hours, about how he hadn't planned Saturday well enough, they should have gone swimming, about how cross he got with Joy Sunday morning when she was roller skating around the house with the pancake batter, waving the spoon, batter flying on the walls, on the floor, on my Navajo rugs. He would talk about how much better he could have been. He would relive every minute of the weekend, lay it all back out the way you would lay out a bridge hand after you play it, to see how you could have finessed the queen. And ifl was very quiet and didn 't take any of the bait, after an hour or two of remorse, he would come back to me, he would remember me. And since he was completely unconscious that he had forgotten me while Joy was here, he would pick up the thread ofme as ifhe had been holding it all the time. It would take me a while to thaw. But he was good at thawing me. So it would work. We would go on. We would go on, and he would try to push it, planning long family camping trips, bicycle trips, canoe trips. When you're in a tent in the rain on the Olympic Peninsula with your husband and the girl who completely owns him, you can't just call a friend. You can't just go to the studio. You just have to be there where nobody wants you. That's my issue, of course. I knew that before Cyndy, but she was the one I worked with best on that issue. I remember the Pages, when I was a child in San Luis 35 3Heberlein: Bird on the WirePublished by UAB Digital Commons, 1999Obispo. The Pages lived down the block. I would go by there after school. They gave me milk and cookies. Mrs. Page helped me with my homework. I thought, no, I believed, I believed they were going to adopt me. I believed that my parents understood this as well. One day I said something about how I hoped we could have a dog when I lived there, and Mr. Page looked at me with a deep and serious sadness, did not ask, as many an adult would have asked, what I could possibly be talking about, because he instantly knew exactly what I was talking about, he said only, "Oh, you dear, dear child." And then he spoke to my parents, and they told me the Pages weren't going to adopt me. The Pages said I could still come by after school, but I was so completely destroyed by the fact that they didn't want me, I stopped coming. And of course, I know about my pattern in relationships of searching out men who are unavailable to me, mostly because of this other woman who is meaningful to them in a way I never can be. I spent ten years with Robert, while he spent the same ten years still in love with Greta, still married to Greta, still getting his mail at her house, though our studio was where he slept, almost every night, but his address was her address. That was nothing, though, like the way El was with Joy. It was not just how he forsook me. It was how he forsook himself. I never understood the meaning of the expression "let her walk all over him" until I came in the house one day to see El on all fours and Joy standing on his back. "Daddy surfing," she called it. And if we hadn't spent half our discretionary income that month on his chiropractor's bills, I might not have been so hurt and angry. She was eighty pounds by then, and he still carried her on his shoulders. Her favorite game was to take a long run and throw her weight full at him, to see if she could knock him over. Or if only he had found someplace to rest. A week at his work, a weekend with Joy, and then there was nothing left but coffee grounds, weak, watery, bandaged, hurting, lonely, sad, crabby El for me. His work then, he left in the morning 36 4Astarte, Vol. 6 [1999], Art. 20https://digitalcommons.library.uab.edu/astarte/vol6/iss1999/20while I was still in the shower, and he didn't come home until bedtime, unable to talk. Joy was only every other weekend, and on the weekends without her he'd sleep all day Saturday and then we'd have a wonderful Sunday together. Beautiful long talks, meals out, movies, make a dozen plans we never ended up having time for. It was mostly a life alone, but I was used to life alone. I had my work, and I had a job as well, and my friends, and I got to sleep with El. He was never too tired to share himself with me there, and what we shared there was not something I had ever experienced, or expected to experience. So it would really only hurt when Joy was actually there. If I could just have let go of the two of them, it would have worked even then. If I even could have just let go of her. But of course I fell in love with her. She was a love. And, for all she was doted on by her dad, for all she was guarded and desired by her mother, she was not parented by anyone. I tried to give her some structure. I tried to teach her to use a fork, to say please. I cared about her. I cared about her, and I saw her being abandoned. Her father, he just loved her utterly unconditionally, he'd look at her through eyes of love and have no notion she was chewing with her mouth wide open, talking all the while. Nobody taught her how to comb her hair, to keep herself clean. I tried to give her this. I knew what it was to go into a world of people who know these things and not know these things. I wanted to give her this gift. To help prepare her for her life. Boy, did that really not work. Both of them, all they heard was that Ollie was picking on poor little Joy. "All you ever do is criticize her," El said to me once after she left, and I realized it was the only time he had ever used language like that on me, that "all you do," that "ever" stuff. So I tried to not, or I tried to sneak it in. I tried to make it a game, the manners game. "Let's pretend the Queen is coming for dinner tonight." Only I can't do games. I can't do pretend. If I could do games, if I could do pretend, I might have been down crawling around on the floor with the two of them. 37 5Heberlein: Bird on the WirePublished by UAB Digital Commons, 1999I worried about her. I cared about this child, and I worried. I worried that every day she was getting more self-centered. She had never been given any responsibility. I know, and you know, and everyone who has ever read a book or attended a class knows, that the greatest gift you can give a child is self-respect, self-confidence, the ability to handle responsibility. El knew this too, knew this when he was reading those books and in those classes, or talking to Emily, or even sometimes when talking just to me. He sure didn't know it when he was with Joy. He'd pick up her dishes at the table, he'd make her bed, he'd put away the toys, he'd let her interrupt him, he'd bail her out the instant anything got a tiny bit hard, he'd encourage her to whine by giving her anything she wanted when she did. I cared about her as a woman friend to be, as someone who would get hurt because she didn't know how to take care of herself. I felt that both her parents were abandoning her, and I didn't want to abandon her too. Only I had no rights in the matter. I had no standing. I didn't even have any visibility. Ten years, the three ofus together in that house. I remember the last Christmas. I had outdone myself that year. I'd done telephone research on what fifteen-year-old girls liked, asking friends of friends of relatives what their children were into. And I bought her some woman things, some self-care things, some things to try to prod her into some pride in herself. El hadn't done anything. He'd been working sixteen weeks straight, until midnight. He was trying to ship his big product, right as he was trying to sell the company, and the product didn't work. He'd been on planes to places like New Jersey, Thailand, South Carolina, and Israel trying to hold the deal together while he tried to make the software work. I didn't see him until the night of December 23, when he came through the door with Joy hanging around his neck. We had our Christmas on the twenty-fourth, as we always did, so Joy could be with her mother on the twenty-fifth. As we sat around the fireplace, as Joy arranged all the presents in piles, hers, mine, her dad's, I was so wrought-up, so hoping I had done it right. I had really worked hard on it this time. And I really thought I maybe could win. I could win her. I could show her I knew who she was. I could reach out and touch her with the choices I had made. And for a while, 38 6Astarte, Vol. 6 [1999], Art. 20https://digitalcommons.library.uab.edu/astarte/vol6/iss1999/20for a little while after Christmas, she would remember. She would have seen me, seen me see her. She would know I was there. I was not looking for gratitude. I was not looking for love. I just wanted her to know I was there. Well, you can guess how that came out. She would look that look of surprise and disbelief as she opened the box - like the look when she heard I wanted to move in with them. And then she'd say something polite and put the gift, the gift that was just the right size and in exactly her color, even though I'd had to call six stores to find that color, she'd drop it on the floor behind her and not look at it again that night, El picked it up to put it in a pile in her room after she left with her mom. I can still remember how I felt, after about the fifth one, when I realized how far off I had been. I had completely missed her. I had tried so hard, I had had this chance, and I had missed her completely. El would have known who she was. He would have known who she was and what she wanted. I had tried to be El to her, and the three of us sat there as the evening grew on, more and more embarrassed about what a bad job I had done. I vowed never to try again. Of course I didn't get the chance. That spring, after El sold the company, he was finally free to work in the garden as he'd been saying for ten years he wanted to do. He always said all he wanted in life was to sit in the back yard with his family. He always called us that- his family. He had a picture in his head of a family. That used to make me feel more worthless than anything else, knowing all he needed besides Joy there was anyone else to fill in the empty place in that picture, a mannequin might have done. We both thought it would be different after he sold the company. I was looking forward to life with only Ellis Daniels, no Ellis Daniels, Incorporated. I was going to quit my job, too. We were going to travel, we had projects, only it took me a month to train a replacement, and before my replacement was trained, I came home one day and found his body in the garden. Shovel and wheelbarrow. Tall pile of dirt. El stiff and cold, his face all twisted and pained. 39 7Heberlein: Bird on the WirePublished by UAB Digital Commons, 1999You know, I never imagined life with El. Before. I had my friends, I had my work, I had my job. I had a good life. I never desired as much as I had with El. I never expected it. And then I never imagined losing it. I never imagined having to sleep without El. And then I lost Joy. In the huge grief of losing El, I almost didn't even notice, until one day Deborah asked me on the phone ifl were free on a given Saturday night and I almost said I had to check and see if that was a Joy Saturday. Then I realized there were no more Joy Saturdays. Somehow, some part of me, the part of me that expected the Pages to adopt me, I guess, that part expected Joy to keep coming. Joy and her mom came, a few weeks later, came and cleaned out her clothes. Joy didn't even look at half the things I thought were special to her. Once or twice I held one out to ask if she didn't want it. "Oh, I don't need that," she'd say, in a polite voice. And then she was gone. She didn't even hug me at the door. Of course, she would never hug me in front of her mom, but this girl, she had been, if not my child, the closest thing to my child my life would ever have, for ten years, and she got into the car with her mother and she waved. She looked back as they drove down the hill, looked back and waved again. I got out of that town. It was so strange to have money. El was so broke when I met him, his company wasn't making payroll, he was living on Visa. When we moved to Seattle, we had to wait until I sold a painting so we could get married, so we could have money for a trip. The whole time we lived together, I cooked black beans and sewed my own clothes, while he bought hundred-dollar plastic electronic things for Joy. And then he died and left me with all this money. There's this huge account in Working Assets with all the money I'll ever need for the rest of my life, and every three months the company that bought them sends me a big check more. I went to New York. I bought this studio. 40 8Astarte, Vol. 6 [1999], Art. 20https://digitalcommons.library.uab.edu/astarte/vol6/iss1999/20The hardest part was not having a job. If I'm honest with myself, that was a way harder adjustment than losing El. Losing El was rasping, drilling pain. Not having a job went on all day every day. There was nothing but me and the paint. No job to go to. Just me and the paint. All the things I had used the job to hide from, over a lifetime, they all came up. I had to face them one at a time. So that now I'm who I am where I am today. I can tell I'll never get my retrospective at the Whitney. But I show in hot shows sometimes. I was in the last Biennale. I got my picture in Art Farzan just last year. I still have my friends. New friends and old friends, friends that go all the way back to San Luis Obispo. Friends like Deborah, friends I know I'll see for two weeks a year, and talk on the phone an hour a week with forever, no matter which city which of us happens to live in now. I always send Joy a Christmas card, and she never sends one back. When she called me last Tuesday, I knew the voice. It had changed. She's twenty now. I knew who it was, though. Be in town for a week. On her way to England. I said she could stay here. She's staying with friends. She wanted to see me, though. We made this date. She's an hour late now. She will come, though. She can be an hour late, but she wouldn't just not come. I don't know if this will be the meeting I always wanted to have with her, or if this will be like before, or what this will be like. I wish I could care even just a little bit less. - L. A. Heberlein 41 9Heberlein: Bird on the WirePublished by UAB Digital Commons, 1999

Bird on the Wire

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Bird on the Wire

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