The Inn’s website boasts a recent remodel, yet the old design has only been reinforced with fresh paint so it looks newly out of date. Above the mud-colored carpets, wallpaper vines strangle the walls, here and there resulting in a salmon-colored tulip. There are fleets of staircases and elevators and floors large enough to simultaneously host several cathartic events. In another banquet hall, another wedding will run alongside ours. The plural of catharsis is catharses. The turnover is quick. Already, a lobby poster welcomes attendees of the following week’s conference that seems to be about technology and clouds.
The Inn is buckled to a famous lake that features prominently on the town’s signage. None of my people are from this area so the lake is not famous to us. It is akin to pointing to an actor and saying, That’s so and so, from a show we’ve never watched. A gazebo sits in an exultation of cattails. A ruffle of trash by the edge of one of the lake’s many inlets. I prefer the ocean because it is ugly and secretive and moody and can growl. Mind you, I’m “awful” and “rarely satisfied.”
So far, my relaxation has manifested in inventing needs so I can have lingering conversations with the staff. I was finishing the place cards earlier when I thought, toothpaste, and wandered downstairs to inquire about the photograph taped to the concierge’s computer screen.
“I’m not sure if you’re aware what day you’ve landed on.” I speak to the bird in the grated voice you employ for a guest who’s arrived too early. “It’s Sunday. I’m getting married in six days.” I gesture to the migration of folded cards that cover the carpet in ecru Vs, anointed with all I can recall from high school calligraphy. “I have a work appointment tomorrow, a meeting with the florist, then I host our families for the groom’s dinner. Mom, stepfather, friends arrive later this week. Et cetera. Have you come to wish me well?” I say, but knowing her, my tone contains no hope.
Of course I know you’re getting married. The edges of her projection spit and haw. Do you think I’m here to ask about wires in a box? She goes transparent and her skeleton shows blinding bright, then whatever debatably divine force is conjuring her regains composure and she is opaque again. There’s something I want you to do.
A rap on the door startles me and the bird, who fwips from the glass to the table like traveling from one thought to the next.
Through the peephole, I see a bellboy standing above a rolling table holding a metal-covered plate. “Ma’am?”
“I didn’t order anything,” I say.
Several feet behind him, the elevator dings. He says, “It’s a surprise.”
My grandmother warbles.
“Surprise!” He is faux cheerful.
I open the door. He glides in, activates the brakes on each table leg, flips the plate’s cover to reveal a cake that says, Congratulations!, bats a napkin he pulls from an unseen compartment against the air then folds it into a triangle. His expression grows concerned, echoing mine.
I have what people call an out-loud face, one that others mimic without realizing. It may be the generous, peat-colored eyebrows, or the phrase they make with my conversation-piece nose. Strangers ask, Are you confused? Or, comment: You’re having fun. What they mean is, I’m less good than others at hiding.
The bellboy follows my gaze to the grandmother now roosted on the pillow and shrieks, drops the napkin. “A bird!” He heads to the door. “I’ll get the manager.”
“No need to call anyone,” I say. “It’s handled.”
“I hate birds,” he says. “Like, really hate.”
My grandmother’s feathers shiver with laughter.
“She’s very small,” I bargain.
“Doesn’t matter,” he says. “Small, big. Hate them and always have.”
My grandmother flies across the room and clings to the frame of a painting with one mirthful claw. This enjoyment of other people’s discomfort was true in life. She is at once wholly grandmother and wholly bird, as she produces a multigarble that sounds like bland women kvetching. Louder, then louder.
“Oh god,” he says. “What’s it doing?” His fear is so antic it must be a put-on. He cowers in a crescent shape against the wall.
Tack, tack, my grandmother threatens cheerfully.
“I’m calling the concierge,” he whispers.
“Stop,” I tell her. Then to him, “We don’t need the concierge. This is my bird. We were talking.”
“‘My’?” he says. “‘Talking’?”
“Birds talk,” I say.
My grandmother seems to chitchat with herself then produces a showy, wooden, Hello.
I imagine the room from his perspective. Bride talking to bird. He looks like a kid who muscles through situations in which women want him to leave with what he thinks is charm. But he’s probably never met women like us. Critical, exuding a very taken vibe, hawkish (on certain evenings literally). Even in bird form my grandmother is all of these things, you can tell by the way she’s needling him with gleeful, haughty eyes.
“Money.” I hand him a twenty. “Don’t tell the concierge I have a bird in here.”
He winces, consults the bill in his hand.
“Secret,” I say. And, in case it’s the kind of thing that matters to him: “I’m the bride.”
I guide him out. “Thank you for the surprise,” I say. “I do like sweets.”
“Raspberry.” His voice is sad.
I want to seal the transaction with a compliment. “This is one of the nicest places I’ve ever stayed in Long Island.” Not technically a lie. I’ve never stayed anywhere else.
“On.” He snaps to attention. “Long Island. We say on.”
“On Long Island?” I test. “Does that make sense?”
He nods. “On.”
I close the door and return to the antechamber where the bird is sitting mid-cake. Give an old lady a break, she says, does not say. I can’t have any fun?
She tries for a raspberry but neither berry nor beak will allow her to eat. She exists in this world but can exert no physical influence, which is news to someone like her.
* * *
Her mother, my great-grandmother, was banished from the Basque Country for getting pregnant with a Romany’s child. She missed the banishing ship she was supposed to take from France to America. I like to think it was because she lost track of time while doing her hair. You never know what worse luck your bad luck saved you from. It was 1912. The ship she was supposed to take was the Titanic. Fig, I missed my ship. Sound of ship hitting an iceberg. Sound of ship cracking in half. Sound of cello. The scuffle of drowning. Safely on another vessel two days behind the Titanic, my great-grandmother gazed across the icy churn, my grandmother growing in her like an amniotic orchid, an accidental immigrant. My grandmother was tormented in her white neighborhood for her dark skin, and carried that pain into adulthood, where it bloomed into benevolent disgust. She gave birth to an ice chip, my mother.
Years later on the pale disk of Lake Champlain, my mother missed a ferry. In the hour she spent waiting for the next one she drank a Seven and Seven and met my father, a dockworker from the mountains who was the first in his family to cross a state line. He died of heart failure when my brother and I were young, leaving us alone with her temper, a line of crystal in igneous rock. A secret to everyone except those who lived with her.