A Bird

The surgeon’s daughter grew up in a house that had four stories and an elevator. Sometimes the neighbor boy came over and they rode the elevator up and down until her father told them the elevator wasn’t a toy, wasn’t a ride in an amusement park. Her father, she told the neighbor boy, was a surgeon. She and the neighbor boy stalked around the backyard and he told her his father was a plumber who often got called to people’s houses in the middle of the night and she said that sounded like a cool job and he didn’t say anything and she wondered if this was as far as things could go between two people. That summer and the summer after they fell in love. The trajectory of their love matched their progress into puberty. One June day he came over and they rode the elevator to the fourth floor, the floor where her bedroom was, and she invited him in, or maybe she just went in and left it up to him to follow or not. He asked whether they’d get in trouble. In trouble for what, she said. In her bedroom they talked but their talk was like the rehearsals of The Pirates of Penzance, last spring’s school play. She felt him staring at her, waiting for her. She was staring at the Lego city she’d built on her floor. She figured if she didn’t do it it wouldn’t happen so she kissed him. He put his hands down the front of her jeans but the angle was impossible, as she’d supposed it would be. She’d imagined this moment before and this was exactly what she’d imagined. But she’d also thought maybe there was something she didn’t know. They kissed for a while, their tongues hurtling past each other like subways, but after his failure down her pants the kissing was like their talking had been. Finally they sat apart from each other. She wondered if this was a part of love, nothingness. She pushed a toy car down an avenue in the Lego city and it crashed into a building which ironically is exactly how the neighbor boy died later that summer, right before the start of school. He was in a car with an older boy and that boy had an aneurysm and the car crashed through the storefront of a printing house. The neighbor boy went partway through the windshield. The car ran over the old man who ran the printing press. Paper flew everywhere. Everyone was rushed to the hospital where her father was a surgeon and all three died on the table, one after another after another. She learned all this gradually and out of order. She went to the neighbor boy’s funeral where there was a problem with the device that was to lower the coffin into the grave. It had to go up and down a couple times. She laughed and her father hit her hard, right in the face. Several people gasped but nothing happened except the coffin finally went down in there. That night her father told her there was nothing he could have done, nothing, and twenty years later his liver went out and he died and she watched a new version of that coffin-lowering device successfully, smoothly, silently lower her father’s coffin into the grave on the first go. Again she laughed and her husband touched her on the small of her back. That night she told her husband about the neighbor boy trying to finger her and how the geometry—the waist of her jeans, the slope of the zipper, the unlucky position of her vagina, of all vaginas, at the sole of the torso—had made it impossible. He didn’t ask her why she was telling him this, who was this neighbor boy, what did he have to do with anything. After all these years with her he knew better. They were drinking iced tea with bourbon, the drink that had killed her father, on their big cedar porch. A bird landed on the railing. This simple phenomenon would have been impossible three months earlier. The porch was an addition. Three months ago it wasn’t here. This bird would have just kept flying.