My sister's home didn't really lend itself to snooping, and so I spent my hour in the kitchen, making small talk with Henry. It was the same conversation we'd had the last time I saw him, yet still I found it fascinating. He asked how I was doing, I said I was all right, and then, as if something might have drastically changed within the last few seconds, he asked again.
Of all the elements of my sister's adult life — the house, the husband, the sudden interest in plants — the most unsettling is Henry. Technically he's a blue-fronted Amazon, but to the average layman, he's just a big parrot — the type you might see on the shoulder of a pirate.
'How you doing?' The third time he asked, it sounded as if he really cared. I approached his cage with a detailed answer, and when he lunged for the bars, I screamed like a girl and ran out of the room.
'Henry likes you,' my sister said a short while later. She'd just returned from her job at the plant nursery and was sitting at the table, unlacing her sneakers. 'See the way he's fanning his tail? He'd never do that for Bob. Would you, Henry?'
Bob had returned from work a few minutes earlier and immediately headed upstairs to spend time with his own bird, a balding green-cheeked conure named Jose. I'd thought the two pets might enjoy an occasional conversation, but it turns out they can't stand each other.
'Don't evenmention Jose in front of Henry,' Lisa whispered. Bob's bird squawked from the upstairs study, and the parrot responded with a series of high, piercing barks. It was a trick he'd picked up from Lisa's border collie, Chessie, and what was disturbing was that he soundedexactly like a dog. Just as, when speaking English, he sounded exactly like Lisa. It was creepy to hear my sister's voice coming from a beak, but I couldn't say it didn't please me.
'Who's hungry?' she asked.
'Who's hungry?' the voice repeated.
I raised my hand, and she offered Henry a peanut. Watching him take it in his claw, his belly sagging almost to the perch, I could understand what someone might see in a parrot. Here was this strange little fatso living in my sister's kitchen, a sympathetic listener turning again and again to ask, 'So, really, how are you?'
I'd asked her the same question and she'd said, 'Oh, fine. You know.' She's afraid to tell me anything important, knowing I'll only turn around and write about it. In my mind, I'm like a friendly junkman, building things from the little pieces of scrap I find here and there, but my family's started to see things differently. Their personal lives are the so-called pieces of scrap I so casually pick up, and they're sick of it. More and more often their stories begin with the line 'You have to swear you will never repeat this.' I always promise, but it's generally understood that my word means nothing.
I'd come to Winston-Salem to address the students at a local college, and then again to break some news. Sometimes when you're stoned it's fun to sit around and think of who might play you in the movie version of your life. What makes it fun is that no one is actually going to make a movie of your life. Lisa and I no longer got stoned, so it was all the harder to announce that my book had been optioned, meaning that, in fact, someone was going to make a movie of our lives — not a student, but a real director people had actually heard of.
'Awhat? '
I explained that he was Chinese, and she asked if the movie would be in Chinese.
'No,' I said, 'he lives in America. In California. He's been here since he was a baby.'
'Then what does it matter if he's Chinese?'
'Well,' I said, 'he's got. . you know, a sensibility.'
'Oh brother,' she said.
I looked to Henry for support, and he growled at me.
'So now we have to be in a movie?' She picked her sneakers off the floor and tossed them into the laundry room. 'Well,' she said, 'I can tell you right now that you are not dragging my bird into this.' The movie was to be based on our pre-parrot years, but the moment she put her foot down I started wondering who we might get to play the role of Henry. 'I know what you're thinking,' she said. 'And the answer is no.'
Once, at a dinner party, I met a woman whose parrot had learned to imitate the automatic icemaker on her new refrigerator. 'That's what happens when they're left alone,' she'd said. It was the most depressing bit of information I'd heard in quite a while, and it stuck with me for weeks. Here was this creature, born to mock its jungle neighbors, and it wound up doing impressions of man-made kitchen appliances. I repeated the story to Lisa, who told me that neglect had nothing to do with it. She then prepared a cappuccino, setting the stage for Henry's pitch-perfect imitation of the milk steamer. 'He can do the blender, too,' she said.
She opened the cage door, and as we sat down to our coffees, Henry glided down onto the table. 'Who wants a kiss?' She stuck out her tongue, and he accepted the tip gingerly between his upper and lower beak. I'd never dream of doing such a thing, not because it's across-the-board disgusting but because he would have bitten the shit out of me. Though Henry might occasionally fan his tail in my direction, it is understood that he is loyal to only one person, which, I think, is another reason my sister is so fond of him.
'Was that a good kiss?' she asked. 'Did you like that?'
I expected a yes-or-no answer and was disappointed when he responded with the exact same question: 'Did you like that?' Yes, parrots can talk, but unfortunately they have no idea what they're actually saying. When she first got him, Henry spoke the Spanish he'd learned from his captors. Asked if he'd had a good night's sleep, he'd say simply, 'Hola,' or 'Bueno.' He goes through phases, favoring an often repeated noise or sentence, and then moving on to something else. When our mother died, Henry learned how to cry. He and Lisa would set each other off, and the two of them would go on for hours. A few years later, in the midst of a brief academic setback, she trained him to act as her emotional cheerleader. I'd call and hear him in the background, screaming, 'We love you, Lisa!' and 'You can do it!' This was replaced, in time, with the far more practical 'Where are my keys?'
After finishing our coffees, Lisa and I drove to Greensboro, where I delivered my scheduled lecture. That is to say, I read stories about my family. After the reading, I answered questions about them, thinking all the while how odd it was that these strangers seemed to know so much about my brother and sisters. In order to sleep at night, I have to remove myself from the equation, pretending that the people I love expressly choose to expose themselves. Amy breaks up with a boyfriend and sends out a press release. Paul regularly discusses his bowel movements on daytime talk shows. I'm not the conduit, but just a poor typist stuck in the middle. It's a delusion much harder to maintain when a family member is actuallyin the audience.
The day after the reading, Lisa called in sick and we spent the afternoon running errands. Winston-Salem is a city of plazas — midsize shopping centers, each built around an enormous grocery store. I was looking for cheap cartons of cigarettes, so we drove from plaza to plaza, comparing prices and talking about our sister Gretchen. A year earlier she'd bought a pair of flesh-eating Chinese box turtles with pointed noses and spooky translucent skin. The two of them lived in an outdoor pen and were relatively happy until raccoons dug beneath the wire, chewing the front legs off the female and the rear legs off her husband.
'I may have the order wrong.' Lisa said. 'But you get the picture.'
The couple survived the attack and continued to track the live mice that constituted their diet, propelling themselves forward like a pair of half-stripped Volkswagens.
'The sad part is that it took her two weeks to notice it,' Lisa said. 'Two weeks!' She shook her head and drove past our exit. 'I'm sorry, but I don't know how a responsible pet owner could go that long without noticing a thing like that. It's just not right.'
According to Gretchen, the turtles had no memories of their former limbs, but Lisa wasn't buying it. 'Oh, come on,' she said. 'They must at least have phantom pains. I mean, how can a living creature not mind losing its legs? If anything like that happened to Chessie, I honestly don't know how I could live with myself.' Her eyes misted and she wiped them with the back of her hand. 'My little collie gets a tick and I go crazy.'
Lisa's a person who once witnessed a car accident, saying, 'I just hope there isn't a dog in the backseat.' Human suffering doesn't faze her much, but she'll cry for days over a sick-pet story.
'Did you see that movie about the Cuban guy?' she asked. 'It played here for a while but I wouldn't go. Someone told me a dog gets killed in the first fifteen minutes, so I said forget it.'
I reminded her that the main character died as well, horribly, of AIDS, and she pulled into the parking lot,
