One day Malena brought home a small pot of indigo ink and took out her collection of lost flight feathers.  From among them, the long yellows and whites, blues, greens, and pearly greys, she chose one of Pepper’s, a white edged with grey, and dipped its shaft into the ink.  She watched the dark ink rise in the hollow, translucent shaft, absorb into the pith, the soft center, and then wrote out his name, Pepper, in the most ornate script she could manage.  She imagined herself a scribe in an ancient, crumbling cell, copying out a long encyclopedia entry, the flight of birds. 

For her birthday in January Paul suggested a trip to Hawaii; Just a few days.  A get-away, he said.  Remember Maui?  Malena remembered: honeymoon days, sunning and snorkeling and laying out the map of their life together; bodies baking and toes searing in the white sands, they’d traced a straight-away, all-Interstate trip for themselves.  They walked the beaches in the full blush of the moon and stars, the sun, their wedding and their future, and they planned.  All that planning is what she now remembered most.  Hawaii sounds great, she told him, knowing how full were his weeks at that time of year.  In the decade she’d known him he’d never before left the island of Manhattan during tax season.  This is really nice of you, she told him.    

Connie, she was sure, would come twice a day to look after the birds.  

The column she worked on in the next few days had to do with what was inherent in a gesture, its fostering complex of impulses, thoughts, and feelings.  She had witnessed, she wrote, many gestures in the last week, actions or words that were bigger than themselves, represented more, spoke more.  She’d seen more than a few bus seats vacated and offered to the pregnant and elderly, strangers volunteering to carry baby strollers up subway stairs, people in market lines pitching in pennies when the customer ahead of them had none.  There was power in gesture, she told her readers, intentional or not.  Malena saw it as a cogent column, ephemeral perhaps, but worthy.  Charlie called, ebullient, saying, Listen to this one!   And Malena heard from a play-back of the response line tape, Shorten the leash, she’s out of control!  In a personal note to her a reader wrote in perfect, Palmer Method penmanship, I’m from Cincinnati, too, but I think I liked your columns better when you told me where to find clean bathrooms in Midtown.  

What about a book, Malena, a collection?  Charlie called to ask one morning.  I’ve been thinking it might be time; what do you think?  

Malena stood with the wireless phone tucked between her shoulder and ear, listening, while the fingers of her right hand rested on a perch inside the parakeet cage.  For a couple of weeks now she’d been doing this at least three times a day, and the little ones, as she thought of them, had begun to hop onto and off of her fingers as if they were perches.  She’d been bitten a few times but accepted the bites as her part of the initiation.  The green one, bolder than the blue, sat on her index finger now and seemed content to be given this tour of its cage.  

So, what about it? Charlie repeated.  Malena, you there?  

I’m here, she said into the cage.  The bird on her finger turned its head to hear her better.  Canaries were too skittish to tame, really.  She found she could make them less afraid, more secure maybe, but they just really didn’t want to become pets.  They wanted to sing and play, and she respected that.  But the parakeets were another story; they were interested in everything she did and said and, daily, seemed to shed first fear, then apprehension, then finally hesitation.  A book, huh?  

Yeah.  Would you want to look through back columns and start to think which ones might be good?  I’ve got some ideas...  Malena listened to Charlie and smiled at the little ones.  The blue had hopped on now too.  What Charlie didn’t know was that she’d been thinking about a book for a while, but not the one he was suggesting.  Lately she’d had an urge to make up something.  A short story, a novel?  She wasn’t sure.  She worried that she didn’t have the capacity to conjure up, to imagine fully, to create the whole and diverse lives characters would need.  Should I call back, Malena?  Is this a bad time?  

No, Charlie, not at all.  I think it’s a good time.  With her left hand she held open the cage door and, as smoothly as she could, drew her right back towards her.  The little ones sat squarely on her finger and didn’t seem a bit surprised to find themselves outside their home.  

Four Canaries, Two Parakeets, Two Lovebirds

Leone helped her.  Into the wall they secured the bolts of the arm-like hanger with its little inverted question mark hook on the end.  She hung the cage with its two peach-faced lovebirds and stood back, pleased.  The pair sat together, folded wings touching, crowded into a corner, and watched her.  Around them in the weak sunlight of late-winter the study was busy; from other cages the canaries sang and sang, and the parakeets scolded the disruption, the addition, the change in their room.  Malena opened their cage door and both budgies promptly hopped out and onto her shoulder.  We’re the little ones, she said in the low, certain tone she used just for them and turned to see Leone brushing up some fallen seed.  The other woman’s movements were businesslike but relaxed, with an undertone of solicitude that touched Malena; she had watched Leone in the study maneuvering the vacuum, the broom, the polishing cloths around the now crowded room, and never had Malena seen her bump a cage or send the birds into one of their frightened, in-cage frenzies.  Leone, Malena decided as she watched her, was surely misnamed; there was nothing catlike or predatory about her; the birds were safe in her capable sphere.  I been thinking about my old granny lately, Leone said straightening up.  I remember now she used to keep a canarybird.  In the corner of the kitchen where she always was, and the thing sang!  I remember how she prized that little bird so, and I had forgotten.  Malena, now with a parakeet on each index finger, looked over to Leone and smiled.  Good for Granny, she said and wondered what Leone’s grandmother’s name was.  You know, when we were in Hawaii Paul told me the same thing.  That his grandmother had one too.  Malena had met Grandmother Emerson twice, and she hadn’t seemed grandmotherly in the least.  Nor had she seemed the type to keep a bird.  To the parakeets Malena began again, We’re the little ones, as they sat watching her mouth move and followed the words, making them theirs Malena believed.  That day in Hawaii, walking in the white-hot sand, Paul had asked if she had any plans to become a grandmother, and, for a moment, in the off-balance of her surprise, Malena had no idea if Paul’s question came out of humor or hope or fear.  Grandmother?  Her?  Mother?  Hardly.  Wife?  We’re the little ones.   Within the spaciousness of their new home, huddled dejectedly at the end of the perch, the lovebirds sat quaking in the cheerful tumult of the study.  

Misnomers was the subject of a column that came soon after.  The city, as with so much else Malena had come to see, abounded with the misnamed, if not the mistaken.  There was Washington Square for starters, which, she pointed out, was in fact rectangular.  The address of East Side Hair Cutters was on West Fiftieth Street.  Jerry’s Giants were thin, short and tasteless hot dogs and sold by a guy named Vito from a tiny, decrepit corner stand.  And some of those burnt-out, vial-littered, grassless plots up above 125th Street were actually called parks.  Just because something was called a square, a giant, a park didn’t make it so, she suggested; these were matters of essence, of being; she knew them to be so, she told her readers.  As she faxed that one off, she could almost hear the irate voices start up on the response line and feel the quickened pulse in the ensuing mail.  Malena, Charlie said when he called, this is a good one, old girl.  They’ll eat it up!  And spit it back out, Malena thought, watching what was going on inside the home of the lovebirds.  Now what about the collection, what have you done? he said.  I talked to your agent.  

Malena could hardly hear him for the birdsound around her.  Hey, Charlie, did you know that ‘lovebird’ is a misnomer too? she said.  These guys don’t much like each other and they sure don’t love me.  A peach-faced skirmish was under way, with one bird fiercely pecking at the other, and that one screaming back in protest.  Misnomer, indeed; here in her own private life a case clear and simple. 

Masks only, read the party invitation.  A spring costume ball hosted by one of Paul’s clients.  Malena worked a long time on her mask, fashioning the papier-mache into a rounded cranium that sloped into a short, pointed beak.  Two eye sockets.  She let it dry a day then painted it, then she completed the head by gluing on every feather she’d collected, and tried it on.  In the mirror what she saw was a bird.  

Aviatrix, she told people who asked, a female of a heretofore unknown avian species.  People nodded approvingly.  And do you have a mate here tonight?  She pointed to Paul who was having great difficulty, even with a straw, trying to drink through the rubber of his slasher mask.  

Do I know you? a man in a wolf mask asked, turning back to her from Paul and the straw.  I doubt it, she said; she knew almost no one there, and the completeness of her avian head preserved her anonymity from the few she did know.  What do you do? he asked.  One of the few homemade ones there, her mask was attracting, and holding, a lot of attention.  The wolfman was intent.  I write, she told him, fiction.  The wolfman nodded.  Ah.  Stories for children?  He cocked his head.  Novels, she lied, for adults.  The bird head was hot, but not as bad as it might have been, certainly not as hot as the rubber slasher’s or the wolf’s; she’d thought to bore little airholes all over it and then camouflaged them with feathers.  Ah.  Do you have one going now?   Malena nodded.  How long have you been working on it? he stepped closer to ask.  Eight, nine years, she said; she’d been telling this story, in one form or another, all evening.  I sell commodities, the wolfman said, but I have to tell you, I’ve always thought there was a novel in me!  His voice had become animated.  Ah, said Malena, nodding again, and heard feathers whisper against the papier-mache.  He was the fourth she’d met tonight, two Bill Clintons and a Klingon before him, who believed they had novels in them.  Always room on the shelf for more fiction, she said and saw him smile behind the pickets of his teeth.  He came yet another step closer and said, reverently, May I touch your feathers?  

Four Canaries, Two Parakeets, Two Lovebirds, Two Quakers

Paul came one morning to tell her about his strange dream.  You dreamed we were birds and made a nest and I laid eggs, she said.  He stood gape-mouthed in the door of the study, fingers dangling.  How can you know that? he asked.  I dreamed the same thing, she said.  In the dream she and Paul were enormous, the size of themselves as human beings, but definitely bug-eating, feathered, and flighty.  She’d produced a clutch of four eggs but hadn’t known what to do with them.  These birds...  From the door sill he gestured to all the birds in their hanging cages.  Every inch of space in here, Lena, every inch...  Now I’m dreaming them, myself, us.  This is scary.  He did look scared, Malena saw.  I don’t think it’s scary, she said.  Paul extended his arms and braced himself by his two hands on the door’s molding, and he appeared much as he had in the dream, wings spread, watching.  There’s no space left in this room.  Hardly any for you, and none at all for more birds.  Malena looked around her, first to the two big cages of canaries, then to the parakeets, then over to the quarrelsome lovebirds, and finally into the peaceful home of the brilliantly green quakers with their perpetually moving grey heads.  I guess the next step would be to put screen doors there, she gestured to where Paul stood, and just let them all fly around together.  A real aviary.  She smiled even as she shook her head at him and noticed that his hair was quite different.  Shorter, or longer, though she couldn’t register which.  What are you doing? he asked.  What’s happening?  Maybe his hair was a different color entirely.  Birds, she said, dreams, life, that’s what.  Paul stepped back; his breath had gone raspy.  I didn’t like being a bird, he told her, back to the dream again.  

Oh, I did, Malena said.  

People, Paul said, don’t leave people they’re still being nice to.   She was being nice to him; why not be nice, she wondered, but she was leaving.  She was nearly finished writing the introduction for the City Life collection, and characters had come into her mind, bringing situations of their own, things to think about and say to each other.  They were there, firmly in mind, and ready.  She, too, was ready.  Paul said he wouldn’t believe any of it till he saw it, her leaving him, her move.  Ninety-Fourth Street, he said when she told him where; over there?  There’s nothing over there but bums and re-run movies.  Paul wheezed when he talked too fast, he’d always done that, and he was wheezing that day.  Scrambling yuppie mothers that dress their kids in tie-dyed shirts to go and wait in line at Zabar’s.  This makes no sense!   It was a day of full spring, warmth and sun.  They were in the living room, and from the study there came the riot of bird voices.  Wanna-be actors, Malena.  Mongrel dogs running loose all over Riverside Park.   His asthma, usually not bad, flared in moments of stress.  His fingers kept clenching, then he’d force them, over and over, to uncoil and relax.  This, she recognized.  Several times he paced a wordless circuit, clenching and relaxing, from one large window to another to the door of the dining room, then came back to stand over Malena where she sat on the couch.  You know what it smells like down in that park?  Go take a whiff of that boat basin sometime!   Jeeze, think about this, will you.  Eyes popping a little, completely winded, with his atomizer headed for his mouth, Paul managed to squeak out a version of her name in a voice she hardly recognized.  He walked to the study door and stood looking in at the suddenly-still birds, silent himself now except for the sounds of his troubled breathing.