A Walk-Through Human Heart

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 Georgia—who lived in Portland, where she’d grown up and nearly died—said, “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. Florence—her long-lost friend, lost on purpose, currently muumuued Florence—might 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 sale—little 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 macramé 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 that—

not 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–chubby 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 days—on that day—wore 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 tried—if she tried now, in Austin, Texas—she 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 gun

—“Cakecakecakecakecake.” 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.

The children weren’t friends any longer, thank God. Fate and their mothers had kept them apart—Florence most of all. She decided that he was contagious—he must have caught his troubles from some other, worse boy

—and this was the way she failed her son. Wasn’t caution catching, too?

Shouldn’t he have been exposed to plenty of it?

That’s what Thea guessed, anyhow.

The funeral was open casket, which surprised Thea. They’d combed the curls right out of his hair, though maybe he’d done that himself, alive; maybe they’d been working from a recent photo. On the church pew Thea and Georgia slid on the needlepointed cushions and did not know whether they were supposed to pray aloud with the believers or not. It was jam-packed. People wailed. You’d think the whole world would never recover.

Afterward, at the house, Florence held them by their elbows. How different did she look from the day they’d met thirteen years before at the converted fire station, the groovy mother, the mother of many colors? (How different would she look now, her child gone nearly that long?) This was the last time they might see each other, thought Thea. She wished she had done something, slept with Loren, loaned Orly money for his fatal dose, something that could not be forgiven. She didn’t want Florence to come looking.

“He loved you,” Florence said to Georgia, caressing her elbow, squeezing it.

“He loved everybody,” said Georgia, who’d had to borrow a pair of her mother’s pantyhose for the occasion.

“No,” Florence said. “He loved you particularly.”

Florence knew what she was doing. She was the sort of person, thought Thea, who said a thing aloud when she suspected it wasn’t true. Not lying exactly, but as though she were wrestling with an immense and troublesome and essential emotion, and in telling you, gently, that it was a thing to be venerated, an unusual variety of love, she was handing you the corners so

you could help gather. He loved you particularly. You always loved each other.

And then she let go, and Georgia was left holding that unwieldy feeling.

It blew back over her, and she was caught.

She was sixteen. Not a prodigy at annihilation, like Orly, but a quick study.

The store on Burnett was not a mineral cave but an animal den, carved out by a creature partial to must and floral sheets and PEZ dispensers. A junk shop, a proper one, like walking into somebody else’s disordered brain, which operated on this lie: it was good to collect ephemera because if things were worth saving—if a volume of Reader’s Digest Condensed Books with abridgements of Ngaio Marsh could persist—why not all of us?

Thea peered into a display case full of drinking glasses that had once been jelly jars, with pictures of the Flintstones on them, another thing Georgia had begged for, and Thea could taste cloying grape on the crest of her tongue, bad jelly that you had to suffer through so you could drink later.

They’d only ever gotten one, which Thea would have jettisoned when she’d left Portland. She had boxed up the board games and the stuffed animals, the decks of cards and bowling trophies, all of it now seemingly, eerily here, mangled and for sale.

The emptied rooms of dead children, she saw now. Or whose parents had given up on them. It wasn’t really a store; it was too dense, too personal for that. A hoarding. Evidence of damage. You hoarded because you lost someone. Lost someone, and decided, never again, not a person, not a thing.

From the back room of the junk shop stepped the proprietress, a shopworn woman in her fifties with long knotted hair. The authoress of the hoarding. She wore gunmetal blue jeans and a plaid cowboy shirt with pearl snaps. Thea realized, with the feeling of a dropped package, that the woman must have been about her own age. It wasn’t that Thea forgot she was fifty-two, only that people who were her own age were also fifty-two.

“Want something, darling?” the woman asked.

“I’m looking for a doll.”

“We got dolls!”

“A particular kind,” said Thea. “It was big in the seventies and eighties.”

The woman covered her mouth, the way already quiet people do to listen, and nodded encouragingly.

“Baby Alive,” said Thea.

The woman looked at Thea with a wet-eyed, accusing, marsupial expression. This went on for a while. It was like being on the phone with someone and not knowing whether you’d been disconnected. The longer Thea looked, the more varieties of emotion she detected: sorrow, fury, a tiny sense of humor trying to fill its sails with wind.

“If you don’t—” said Thea at last.

The woman took her hand from her mouth. “Do,” she said. “Think so.

This way.”

Longing always did bring you worse and worse places, to junk shops and deserted parks; longing had in Georgia’s life taken her to unfamiliar dorm rooms when she was still in high school, to group houses and dingy apartments, to drink in, smoke in, shoot up in, and finally overdose, which she did for the first time in an abandoned house in East Portland. First time, that’s what Florence called it when she phoned Thea. How had the news found her? But Thea was glad to hear Florence say, in the calm voice of a driver spinning into a ditch, “Here we go.”

“Listen,” said Florence. They were driving around the city. Georgia was locked up in rehab near Medford, but Florence was showing Thea the places she would need to look next time: the public parks, a particular arch under a particular bridge, the empty houses, the old communes gone off the rails. “You can’t blame yourself, and you can’t blame Georgia. She’ll lie to you. I mean, obviously she’s already lied to you, you know that. But she will lie and she’ll steal. It’s not her. It’s the disease. It’s out of her control.

Your job is to love her. You have pills in the house? She’ll steal them, and once she’s stolen drugs she’ll steal the next thing. That’s what I’ve learned.

Once your kid has done the first thing he’d never do there’s nothing he won’t do. Sorry. This is the truth. Sweet Georgia. I’m sorry. I just love that girl, we all do. Sometimes I think the mistake I made was I was too easy on him, and then I remember what he was like when he came back from Cullen

—sorry, Idaho, the place we sent him—and then I think that was the mistake, that’s what we couldn’t come back from. I never wanted to send him there. It was Loren. He hit me once. Orly, I mean, Orly hit me. I don’t think he ever remembered that he did that. In the ear. Thought he’d take it

right off my head. You see this place? There’s a group of kids? Goes all the way back. I’ve missed you, Thea. I’m sorry this is what’s taken for you to call me. Nobody called me. Nobody. No, nobody. I had a kid everybody loved, and then he died, and where did that love go? Into outer space. Into other people’s kids. I hope you know, Thea, that I will love you forever.”

You could think a grackle was somebody you’d lost, or wronged, or owed a favor to, come back to settle accounts.

If Georgia, for instance, had not survived, Thea would have looked for evidence of her persistence everywhere. She would have kept everything, the board game called Life, the board game called Sorry!, the board game called Monopoly: Georgia’s existence . Chinese checkers, and wept over the missing marbles, the empty dimples in the metal board.

“You,” she might have said to a particular grackle. “Georgia. Is it?”

When Georgia got out of rehab, Thea took her to all her childhood favorite places: the ice cream parlor decorated like a nineteenth-century brothel, the mall skating rink, the walk-through heart at the science museum. Inside, you could hear it beat.

“Oh God,” said Georgia in a voice of terror, touching the heart’s wall. A ventricle hung over her head. “They should fill it with blood for the full effect.”

“With cholesterol,” said Thea. “Or heartbreak.”

“With cocaine,” said Georgia, then, “Do you think it beats all night long?”

“Yes,” said Thea, but of course it was some man’s job to turn it off at night, and on again in the morning. She pictured a mad scientist’s horseshoe-shaped switch with a rubber handle on a wall.

Ka-thump, ka-thump. We gotta get out of here, she thought. Not the heart but the city. She’d already found the job in Austin when Georgia announced that, with money from her father, she would leave the country to clear her head. To do what you want out of my sight, thought Thea, who had assumed that Georgia would follow her to Texas, and Thea would never again have to drive around the neighborhoods of Georgia’s disappearance, remembering she might be in there and she might be dead. That whole terrible night with Florence. But they’d both been wrong about Georgia.

Thea got rid of her house and everything in it. Burn the city to the ground, find the inflammable heart like a poet’s in the ashes, wrap it in a handkerchief, bury it in a mausoleum beneath a mile of marble.

Love, love, love, love, love, love, love, love, love, love, love, love, love, love, love, love, love, love, love, love, love.

The word meant nothing. They should replace it with another.

In the junk-shop back room, the woman scaled an outcropping of stacked record albums, covers scuffed to show the shape of the discs inside. Nearby was a box of thick seventy-eights, grackle black and grackle brilliant. Thea thought the cliff might come down. But the woman was goat-footed; she got to the top and came back down and handed over the doll.

Georgia, aged eight, had not just wanted Baby Alive: she had thought it would make the difference. What difference? The only one. Maybe it would have. It was hard to tell, ever, what would make it: the walk-through heart, the indulgent mother, the mean one. They’d driven into a ditch, then away.

They’d kept on going. They’d used up every bit of luck they had, making their getaway. Thea never spoke to Florence again, though Orly was still dead, would be dead forever.

And who’s to say that’s the order things happened in; was it only her junk-shop memory that had arranged them so? Maybe Orly had nothing to do with Georgia, child of divorce, always so uneasy in her body, made to take dance lessons because her mother wished her otherwise, and maybe it was Georgia who’d first pulled a plastic bag out of her pocket and waved it at Orly, Georgia who even now was vowing to raise her child differently: the baby would sleep in their bed, would have two mothers, two actual mothers, who planned to bend the world for their child instead of the easy other way around.

The doll was diaperless, and played with, and autographed: KITTY on its bicep. Its hair, like many an old lady’s, had gone mauve with age.

“She’s written on,” said Thea, looking for a way out.

“Ballpoint.” The woman spit on the tip of her finger and rubbed the K of Kitty away.

“Does it work?”

“Needs a battery, honey,” the woman said, to the doll instead of Thea.

She reached into her jeans pockets. “D or C,” she mused, “D or C: D.”

The doll had a hatch in her back, and the woman loaded a battery, flipped a switch, and turned the doll over.

The baby suckled at nothing. The woman lifted it to Thea, who put out her arms as though the baby were real. She took its churning weight.

Instinctively she put her hand on the baby’s chest to test for heartbeat, or breath, but could perceive only its mechanical hunger.

Could there have been a worse signal to the evil eye? Baby Alive? And what now? She could not take it home, but she could not leave it here. She couldn’t turn it off, but she couldn’t bear to see its empty mouth move and move. Maybe the TSA would see it in her suitcase and blow it up. She got to take her true love home all those years ago, and yes, she would dote on the new baby, but only because the baby would be a pinhole camera with which to look at her daughter, the near-total eclipse, the blinding event. She wanted to buy everything, the jelly jars and the PEZ dispensers, the never-played-with board games with the clicking spinners that told you how far to go and the cards that told you what you had to give up.

“I’ll take her,” Thea said. “Who else have you got?”

Look at the evening grackles strung on their overhead wires like Morse code! Impossible not to believe they spelled out something. But they didn’t; they were meaningless, in their numbers and their prattle. The call of a grackle is known as a grackle: in the gloaming, the grackles grackle.

Maybe they don’t want anything. Maybe they stare because they wonder what you signify. What brought you here, to their front lawn?