from 110 Stories: New York Writes After September 11

Published by NYU Press - 2002

The birds are nestling closer. She noticed them two winters ago - the winter after she moved into the Brooklyn house with her husband and infant son. First only a few fat ones were perched atop the brownstone across the street. The next time she glanced out the window of her study, there were many more. Some were still, frozen against the white sky. Others seemed to be pacing back and forth, as if impatient, waiting for something to happen.

Three years earlier, when she moved with her family into the brick townhouse at the end of a row of darker, more ornate Victorians, she thought they would live there forever. As the men tilted the piano through the doorway, their muscles bulging and straining, the armoire up the steep staircase, her husband's cumbersome desk over the delicate old railing, with each safe arrival she breathed a sigh of relief and thought to herself: we will never leave here. She pictured her son as a teenager bounding up those stairs. Her husband, middle-aged, raking leaves in their small garden. And she - she would become like the older women in the neighborhood, with their shorn hair and dangly earrings, their comfortable, baggy clothing, laugh lines around their eyes. Happy, content city creatures. Gnarly, weather-beaten, like small dinosaurs in a museum.

It has been no time, really. An inhale, an exhale. And now they are leaving. Her study is filled with boxes. The bookcases are empty. The house - she can now finally say it - has felt wrong to her, practically from the beginning. She has felt, the entire time she's lived in this place, as if someone or something has been watching her. Just yesterday, one of the birds flew straight into the closed window of her study, with a dull thud and the papery rustle of feathers. Stunned, it settled on the wide brick ledge outside her window, one black eye trained, or so it seemed, on the interior. What did it see? A woman in a bathrobe hunched over her desk. A man hauling boxes - optimistically - down the narrow flights of stairs. A young boy asleep in his room, a boy whose first words were bus and park and fire truck, urban words which will remain tucked somewhere in his memory as they are paved over with new words - rural words - like tractor and blue finch, daffodil and mountain hike. Today, another bird settles on the ledge. This time a flesh-colored bird, an ugly, monochromatic bird with tumorous bulges along the sides of its neck.

"Go away!" She swats at the window, but the bird doesn't move. If anything, it presses closer against the glass. "Disgusting thing!"

"They're only here to warm themselves in the sun," her husband says. It is nearly spring and the light in the sky has shifted, it's true. She wants to believe her husband. He sees the same things she does, after all.

"But why only on our house?" she asks her husband.

He shrugs, by way of an answer. He doesn't believe in omens.

"Why our house?" she repeats. She hates the tone in her voice. She is whiny and afraid.

"Why not?" Her husband says as he bends down to pick up yet another box. And she knows he wonders: in the new house, will she find new signs? The ladybugs, perhaps? The dead trees lining the driveway?