Some grackles might possess souls and some grackles might possess intelligence but it was impossible to believe that any one grackle possessed both: not enough room in their brilliantined heads. A klatch of them walked unnervingly around the parking lot outside the vintage store like a family at a hotel wedding, looking for the right ballroom. One grackle was missing a foot, and Thea blamed him for it. If they had been magpies, she might have counted them up, wondering what they foretold, but grackles were just seagulls in widows' weeds. They weren't omens of anything except more grackles.
She was here to buy a present. The world had promised a baby (though the world broke such promises all the time), and Thea planned to become that uninteresting thing, a doting grandmother. What was doting? A sort of avian love, an affectionate pecking. Thea had already referred to the baby as my baby, and Georgiawho lived in Portland, where she'd grown up and nearly diedsaid, Mom, don't be disgusting.
Sorry, Thea had said. Comes naturally. You're okay? You're taking care of yourself?
Martine's taking care of me.
She should. But also
I'm fine. I've been fine a long time. Hey, you know who I saw? Florence. At the farmers market. In some weird floral dress. Muumuu, I guess. She's old now. She got old.
Well, she would have, said Thea. That's just math.
She had not thought of Florence in years in the way she had not thought of furniture, or pavement, or the earth.
The vintage store was a cavern built of confiscated things. Immediately Thea's hatred of castoffery came upon her like an allergy. She wanted to sneeze with depression: all the fingerprinted objects that had made it just this far. Instead of stalactites overhead, a series of old suitcases hanging from hooks (flowered, plaid, their insufficient metal wheels exposed). Instead of stalagmites, the kind of bar stools once favored by kicky grandmothers.
She wouldn't be a kicky grandmother. If anybody indeed was kicky these days. Her apartment was so spare, people asked her when she had moved in though it had been ten years. Florenceher long-lost friend, lost on purpose, currently muumuued Florencemight be kicky by now, but she couldn't be a grandmother: her child was dead. That was only one difference between them, the one that counted.
Now Thea closed her eyes and envisioned the particular doll she wanted to buy. Was she trying to divine its presence or magic it into place? She pictured a baby doll amid the shot glasses and quilted skirts. Then she opened her eyes to the great accumulation.
No surprise that the memorabilia of her childhood was for salelittle plastic homunculi on rhomboid plinths inscribed I LOVE YOU THIS MUCH; Playboy drinking glasses; a lacy and emphatic Cross Your Heart bra. Her childhood was as ugly arranged by color and category as it had been in the kitchens and rumpus rooms and Spencers Gifts of her hometown. Wheat-patterned, avocado-hued: vintage. That's how it worked. Your belongings marched alongside you, as you moved toward death: thrift shop, vintage shop, antique store, museum. Look, Thea's chrome childhood bread box, with the Bakelite latch and the identifying badge: BREAD.
Behind the front counter, a woman in a strapless plaid dress shot through with gold stood sorting through a parliament of macram¨¦ owls. The owls smelled, no doubt, of tuna noodle casserole and Virginia Slims.
Thea leaned on the counter. The woman turned, holding a beige owl by its top and bottom, like a town crier with a proclamation. She was plump, luscious, with cat's-eye glasses, carmine lipstick, tattooed wings spread across the territory below her throat and above her breasts, her cleavage creasing the bottom. Her hair was the red pistachios used to be. Something you're looking for? she asked Thea.
Yes, said Thea, and got shy. Do you have a doll section?
Not really. I think we got a Pee-wee Herman. Or there's her. She pointed to a trepanned bisque head in the display case. Other than thatnot really. Here. The woman grabbed a photocopied brochure of local vintage shops and circled a number on a map. Soon she would age out of those glasses, or out of the implicit irony: she would be an actual middle-aged broad, not a young woman playing the part. Try here. Amanda. On Burnett. She's got a ton of dolls.
All grackles were beautiful the way all babies were: if you liked them, yes. Otherwise, only an occasional specimen. They were not hummingbirds or cardinals; they did not flash. Sunlight revealed the iridescence in their dark plumage like poison in a glass. In the morning and evening, they held meetings on telephone wires: you drove under conventions of grackles, their shadowy bodies, their long pensive tails. The birds of Portland, Oregon, had wanted nothing from Thea except her dropped crumbs, which they busied away all busboy-like. In Austin, on the lawns of bungalows, grackles had a patient, dangerous, purposeful look. They seemed to walk more than most birds. Outside the vintage shop, the one-footed grackle hopped along the concrete blocks. His mouth was jacked open. He eyed Thea: I'm a bird, but I could fuck you up.
Thea had been a young mother and Florence an old one. They had brought their children to the same eurythmic dance class, Georgia because she was clumsy and Orly because he was graceful. The class was taught in a converted fire station by a Hawaiian woman the size of an eleven-year-old; she skipped and hit a round drum, followed by her dazzled students. There was a plate-glass window parents could spy through. Make yourself a butterfly! said the teacher. Georgia, age three, made herself a disgruntled Quasimodo with sciatica. Her leotard was too big and gapped around her legs, and Thea loved her entirely. Which one's yours? Florence asked, and Thea pointed, said defensively, I couldn't skip to save my life, and Florence said, Chances are it won't come to that. Her own child, Orly, wore a little blue jumpsuit, like Jack LaLanne's but mid¨Cchubby thigh, and even when the class was led in Head, Shoulders, Knees, and Toes, Orly somehow did it expressively. He was an olive-skinned child with dark curly hair. Georgia was skinny and pale and freckled. Both of them three, but Thea was in her mid-twenties, and Florence somewhere in her forties. Old enough to be
Don't say it, said Florence, who in those dayson that daywore striped dungarees and a sheer Indian shirt. Flowered, like the rumored muumuu. Altogether she seemed highly patterned, light blue eyes with navy blue flecks, a large nose with vertical creases at the bridge. Florence was happily married then to a lean professor of philosophy named Loren; Thea to Max, she thought also happily. If Thea triedif she tried now, in Austin, Texasshe could conjure them up. The children, not the husbands; the husbands never met. Orly and Georgia, Georgia stumble skipping and Orly dancing. Beautiful children. That's what Florence said that first day, as they watched the class: she turned to Thea and said, Wouldn't it be awful not to have beautiful children?
The doll Thea sought was Baby Alive. You fed Baby Alive's mechanical mouth, and Baby Alive's mechanical digestive tract eventually emptied its mechanical bowels into its diaper, which you changed. Please, Georgia had said when she was eight, in the stunned weeping voice of a child whose parents didn't understand her passion, peh-lease. You've got a baby doll, Thea had told her. Pretend it can eat. Just a year ago, at her wedding to Martine, Georgia had mentioned the doll, and Thea had said, Oh, if you'd really bugged me I would have gotten it for you, and Georgia had gasped, betrayed.
Thea couldn't buy anything for the baby until after the birth, for fear of attracting the evil eye, but she could buy the doll for Georgia. Georgia would find it touching, or she'd be hurt. Thea wasn't sure which reaction she hoped for. She knew her maternal love would always be edged with meanness, so as to matter: sometimes you needed a blade to get results.
Of Orly, Florence said, Frankly, I worship that boy. Thea thought it was a funny way to feel about your own child. You worried about your kid; you loved her; you wondered what her existence said about you. Florence's adoration of Orly would have been intolerable had she not genuinely loved all children.
I worship him, said Florence, and you worship Georgia. Geor-jah, Florence called, and then said it again, the syllables distinct, cherry-dark and cherry-sweet.
Hello, said Georgia.
Florence said, as though just remembering, I think there might be cake.
They were sitting in Florence's kitchen, the children cross-legged on the floor eating canned spaghetti, the mothers at the table eating pumpernickel bread and salted butter. The amiable Loren had baked the bread himself. At the mention of cake, Orly shut his eyes and rubbed his stomach. Cake, he said. Cake, cake, cake, cake. Cake, Georgia agreed, though she regarded Orly with caution: he kept saying it like a toy machine gunCakecakecakecakecake. She turned to her mother with a worried expression, a flutter of a smile, a private joke. No, thought Thea, I do not worship her. That would be immodest and unlucky. She worshipped no human being, except Florence herself, a little.
Every Saturday for two years, except summers, Thea and Georgia had lunch after dance with Florence and Orly in their house in Southeast Portland. The house had brown unpainted vertical siding, and looked like a hearty sport-related building somewhere in Europe: a sauna or ski chalet or the place where you strapped and unstrapped your ice skates at the edge of a frozen lake. It was the year that Thea's husband was finishing his dissertation, followed by the year that their marriage was breaking up.
After lunch, in the piney backyard, Orly would cartwheel or walk on his hands or spin until he fell down, and Georgia would somersault knock-kneed and askew, and they both ended up on their backs, laughing at the sky.
Then kindergarten, and Georgia was off to Meriwether Lewis and Orly to Woodstock, where he lasted a week.
He bit his teacher, said Florence. Mrs. Pietsch. I would have bit her, too.
But once you get used to biting, to expulsion, it's hard to stop. He's a wonderful kid, his teachers said, but he bites. Or: He's wonderful, but he can't sit still. Or: He's a good kid. Come get your kid. You need to get your kid. I'm sorry. Orly outgrew dance and he outgrew sports and he outgrew school. He outgrew his bed: he slept on his floor, in his closet, out in the world. In those years Thea heard from Florence only when he'd been missing awhile. I was wondering if he'd called Georgia, said Florence. He's always loved her so. He always had loved her, Thea said; he never had called. He went to rehab twice the year he was thirteen. Twinkle-eyed Vandyked Loren turned out to have a nineteenth-century streak to his parenthood, and Orly was sent for three months to a camp in Idaho for wayward boys. He came home furious, but with roses in his cheeks. He overdosed and detoxed five times before dying in the parking lot of the Safeway at sixteen, brought down to earth for good.
Perhaps he had died somewhere else and been brought there, the police said, as though that might be a solace.