A Matter Of Hydraulics
Published in Feminist Studies 33.2 (2007): 301-308.
It has rained on and off the whole summer. It has rained so much the Moskva River has become a churning stew of mud and sticks and cigarette butts and fallen leaves. The bird inside her jacket pecks at the button of her shirt. She takes the bird out, and it perches on her finger. The rain sluices down, hanging over the windshield like a steel curtain, impossible to lift. She puffs a faint stream of air onto the bird’s breast. She wonders if the bird can sing.
The rain and the bird have been impossible to wake up to. She would draw the curtains and toss a shawl over the cage and crawl back into bed, pulling the blanket over her head. She would hear the rain slaughter her bedroom window and the bird move about the cage, merciless. But you knew it was temporary. Temporary. The word has lodged inside her throat like a herring bone, filling her with the grave emptiness his eyes held when he said that. She remembers scratching the word down with her thumbnail on a paper napkin and then tearing the letters out one by one.
The bird is a gorgeous pet. She admires its silent beauty—its tender-pink coat and the ash-colored mask around its eyes, the long gray feathers forming the outer edges of its tail, the black scrawny feet, and the delicate, useless wings. The bird sits nonchalantly on her finger like on a tree limb, its eyes lost in a garment of rain and the pensive rhythm of the wipers moving over the windshield like two metronomes.
She has a whole hour in the company of the bird before she has to be at work, in the beauty shop, where she cuts hair and trims beards and listens to the gossip her clients bring in. She remembers shampooing his hair for the first time, which was like a tangle of mud and rain—silver-brown. It cleaved to her fingers as she raked her comb through, separating, dividing his hair in symmetrical rows. A five-day stubble sprouted over his cheeks and his chin and down his neck, so the lower part of his face felt as prickly as a field of scorched, half-grown wheat after a summer of drought. She offered to shave it, but he wished to let it grow. He said he needed a new look, a new style, a new lover. He laughed, glancing in the big wall mirror and then at her. She thought he was handsome, even for his age, even with a mesh of wrinkles under his eyes and a few long, sharp ones, taut like guitar strings across his forehead. So she nodded ‘yes’ when he asked her to dinner while she evened out his sides, pressing his hair to the middle of his ears, looking straight at him.
She feeds the bird dry buckwheat because it was all she had when he brought it. The bird doesn’t seem to mind, or it won’t tell. It never does, never says anything but gawks off into the distance, staring through time that is as impossible to stop as it is to revert. She thinks she should’ve sliced the bird an apple or given it a raw egg or taken it for a walk to clear its throat and charge its lungs, so it will sing. But she never does. And the bird never sings. Its only warble—a lackadaisical, fizzled-out sound of something small, like a house cricket, half-lazy, half-asleep.
Their second dinner he cooked at her place and ate off her belly. She remembers the plate sitting under her breasts. He forgot to bring her flowers, twice, which for a Russian man was the same as to never drink vodka, which he didn’t, and she was greatly surprised. Halfway through his beef-stroganoff, he set the plate on the floor and asked her to do something, something she’d been doing since she was fifteen or sixteen, in her bed or in the shower, while she was married, and after she was divorced, but it never involved a man, just her finger or a stream of water—not too strong, not too weak—he asked her to masturbate, while he massaged her feet. She tried, but it didn’t work, she couldn’t let go. Stretching beside her, he lit a cigarette and nuzzled her hair and talked about how lucky it was that in the world so utterly mean and ugly, full of sudden, imminent losses, two people were still able to connect.
The rain has curbed its rage and turned to drizzle, but the clouds are desperate-gray, besieging the sky. The bird nods off on her finger as her arm rests between the seats. She thinks the bird must be old and tired. It prefers sleep and comfort to the exasperating hustle of the day, safe habits to fiery dreams. It desires no change, subsisting on water and buckwheat that somebody delivers to its cage. The bird is content. Its indifference is its armor. She looks closer at the egg-shaped head fused with the body so that only the bird’s long flesh-colored bill points out in the direction of the Moskva River.
He once brought her here for an evening boat ride. The sun sank down, the sky like a graffiti wall—a detonation of pink over morose, dingy gray. He kept pushing her hair back, and the wind kept blowing it in her face. She remembers him saying that sometimes cheating was the only way to stay married, to survive the boredom of family life, that a man was like a boat that needed to be in the water from time to time, to sail with the wind. Sex was simply a matter of hydraulics. She shrugged. She wouldn’t know. She is not a man.
She turns off the wipers and leans back, staring at the colossal statue of the ship and Peter the Great built on the Moskva River a few years ago. She thinks how strange it is that they didn’t raise the statue on the Neva, in St. Petersburg, where the czar lived and where the capital once was. She hears Putin wants to move the capital back to St. Petersburg, but they won’t let him. She thinks it’s right—the capital is not a lover one can swap. The statue is an ugly beast, sooty-green and a hundred meters tall. She can’t see the czar’s bronze shoulders or his head out the car window, just the figure from the waist down, legs spread, hand on the wheel. Down the river, a few small ships rock, moored to the side. The ships are like abandoned lovers waiting to resume their course. The wind tosses leaves against the windshield and stirs the bird. It opens its small rounded eyes and blinks, looking at her as if seeing her for the first time. She runs her finger down the bird’s back and to the tip of its tail that splits in half like a small V.
He often harangued about the inconstancy of love. Happiness was such a volatile gift. The trick was not to be happy, but not to be unhappy. If you were happy all the time, you weren’t paying attention, and then the awakening was a sad and empty room filled with ghosts. She nodded. Once her mother had left for work and came back ten years later. She hadn’t recognized her at first— her hair like dead algae hanging around her face in uneven limp strings. She remembers cooking dinners after school when her mother was gone, hoping she would return, and her father hunched over the table, spooning lumped buckwheat onto his plate or picking bones out of a salted herring, cussing the bitch he’d married. She remembers her mother fighting with her father the morning he was killed in a subway bombing, a few months after her mother had moved back. He yelled that her fried eggs were like her tits—flat and tasteless. And her mother hissed, blowing smoke into his face, that he should try his sperm—not caviar either. Later that night, she’d been watching the news on TV and recognized her father in one of the blood-smeared bodies carried away on a stretcher. She turned the TV off, and it stayed off for half a year, until her mother moved out and her husband moved in and started hanging his unfinished paintings on the walls and thrusting his paintbrushes in her teacups and spreading tubes of paint on her kitchen table. She thinks of the years her husband spent searching for his muse and she spent searching for him—in friends’ apartments, bars, restaurants, liquor stores, over commodes, under kitchen tables, between women’s legs. She finally left him, even though he said she never would.
The bird poops on her pants. She eases it onto the seat next to hers and tries to wipe off the whitish gook with her handkerchief, but it only makes the stain bigger. The bird watches listlessly. Digging inside her pocket, she scoops out some buckwheat and scatters the seeds at the bird’s feet. The bird cracks the seeds with its bill, discarding the brown shells and swallowing the kernels with relish. It poops some more and steps in it and drags it across the plush upholstery, and in a few minutes the seat is a mess of food and feces. The bird trots aside and begins to groom itself, assiduously picking at its feathers. Bending forward, she tries to peep under the bird’s wing, where there’s a splash of gray hidden in a thicket of pink. She wonders how big the bird’s heart is, how small.
She learned that he was married when it was too late, when the other woman he slept with was no more than a name without a face, a ring he didn’t wear, or flowers he never brought. Something small, invisible, unimportant, like a dust mite or a breadcrumb. Yet, she’s powerless to shake it—it’s there to stay. After he told her that he’d never leave his wife, that he could never hurt her like that, the sex continued to be just as passionate but somehow not as free. It seemed that now there wasn’t enough time, wasn’t enough love. Her heart doubled its size and was pushing all the other organs out. The days were longer. The nights were shorter. He came in later, he left earlier, always in a hurry to get home, to cook dinner or call the kids. And although his children were all grown up, he spoke of them as if they were still little. He said it was love—unconditional, indefatigable—no parent ever outgrew it. She shrugged. She wouldn’t know. She is not a parent.
The bird has finished its cleaning ritual. It holds its tail a little higher than the line of the body and occasionally tilts it as if saluting. The bird looks like a mysterious stranger in its pink coat and gray mask. She picks the bird up, closing her fingers with utmost care around its soft, weightless body, just below its head. The wind jiggles the trees, and they splatter water on the windshield. Shouldering the car door open, she waits for the cars to pass and gets out. It begins to rain again, and soggy leaves stick to her shoes as she wades through the mud, walking toward the bridge, thinking that she’ll have to redo her hair once she gets to work. The rain is interminable. It reminds her of her ex-artist-ex-husband’s unfinished paintings that she threw away five years after the divorce, just before she met him and signed her mother into a rehab clinic that she got out of too soon. The bird turns its head back and forth and gives her finger a few unfriendly pecks. She holds it closer, under her chin.
She loves him for the same, unknown reason he doesn’t love her. And although he hasn’t called or come by for thirty-four days, she still keeps her late appointments at the beauty shop open and her evenings free. She remembers him ranting about monogamous marriage as one among many other ludicrous things men set up like a trap they kept being caught in. He laughed, holding her head to his chest in the darkness of her bedroom. He said he was thankful for all the joy and beauty she’d brought into his life, but the world, impervious and cruel as it was, would never let them be what they were—a man and a woman under a blanket, touching, talking, fucking. She didn’t speak. Sliding her hand up his chest and his neck, she let her fingers crawl through his hair. It’d need to be cut soon. The sides had grown out almost to his earlobes, but he wished to have it long now, longer. He took her hand in his and kissed the tips of her fingers and the place right below her palm, at her wrist. She drew her fingers along his face and was terrified to feel his slick, shaved skin.
The bird in her hand winces, its head completely drenched. It tries to free itself, squirming inside her hand, tickling her palm. It no longer looks inert but doleful. It opens its bill as if to say something, to give away a secret it has known all along, but no sound comes out, no twitter, no trill. The bird’s feet are stiff in the air as she carries it across the bridge, pausing at the tall, ornate railing. She can now see the ogre-statue in its full length overlooking the Kremlin—the czar’s bronze crotch looms above her face. Raising the bird higher, she rubs her cheek against its tiny wet head.
On her birthday, after he gave her the bird but didn’t stay for dinner, she opened a can of salted herring and ate it alone, pulling thin, curved bones out of her mouth and piling them on the kitchen table the bird had already shit on. She remembers turning the TV on and off and then grabbing a pair of her work scissors and stuffing them inside her jacket and driving over to see her mother, who’d moved in with a man she had nothing in common with but vodka. She forced her mother to sit still while she wetted and cut off her matted hair in a room that once used to be a kitchen and now was a melee of empty vodka and beer bottles and half-eaten cans of food. Her feet stuck to the floor trashed with cigarette butts as she tried to even her mother’s sides, pressing her orange hair to her patsy cheeks, looking straight at her. Fiddling with a strand of cut hair on her lap, her mother said that she wished she’d stop staring at her like that. “You don’t know shit about shit. You don’t know how many whores I survived, what diseases. Leaving him was easy. Staying away from you was hard. Sometimes people leave other people because they don’t know how to love them, because it isn’t a feeling you can make up.”
“Do you know what day it is?” She wiped her scissors on her pants.
Her mother reached for a bottle of vodka on the windowsill and dragged it onto her lap. “Of course I do. I never miss any holidays. I watch TV. Three-hundredth anniversary of St. Petersburg?” Sucking the cork out, she spat it on the floor. It rolled under what once used to be a stove and now was a fly-and-cockroach marsh. “You wanna drink?”
She shook her head and started moving toward the door, holding the scissors at the sharp end.
“Well, here’s to the great City on the Neva. And to the man who built it. Hey, do you know why they call him Peter the Great and why he’s always spread-legged?”
She turned, taking the scissors into her other hand.
“Because his balls were too big.” Her mother heehawed and gulped some vodka out of the bottle and swallowed, squinting, wiping her nose with her finger.
The bird is a prisoner in her hand. Its head has almost disappeared inside her fist. The bird goggles at her captor. She can feel its heart pound against her fingers like a ticking bomb. She shakes the wet locks clinging to her eyes and her cheeks. They fall back on her face. She remembers him complimenting her hair the last time she saw him, a few weeks after her birthday, when he tried to break up with her over the dinner she was trying to eat. He apologized to the waiter for the mess she made out of her napkin. Leaning against the railing, she holds the bird out in her hand. The river rushes and surges below, abysmal. The moored ships sway from side to side as if in a drunken dance. She wonders what it’s like to be a ruthless killer who slays his victims just for the grim joy of it. She wonders if the bird can swim.
“A Matter of Hydraulics” appeared in Feminist Studies 33.2 (2007): 301-308.