The Cyclical Soul for Beginners

We were just rounding the six-month mark when my dad announced that my mom was now a parrot. “Did you marry it?” I asked. He looked at me, shook his head, and said he was serious. The parrot was coming to live with us.

If I’m being honest, I always wanted a pet. I assumed I’d get a dog, a cat, maybe a hamster. I guessed a parrot would do. When he brought her home, all the acid in my stomach was churning in that nervous-slash-excited way. I wanted to make a good impression. But in the end, it was just a regular parrot, and not a very nice one. No resemblance to my mother, besides that. I definitely wasn’t going to call it by her name.

I imagined walking it on a leash downtown, introducing the bird to strangers: my mother, the parrot. Not that we called it Mom’s real name. That would be ridiculous, Dad said. And you don’t walk a parrot on a leash. I knew that, obviously. It was just part of the imagination.

At the pet store, the placard in front of the parrot’s cage had the name Lovely typed in neat font. It was what Dad called Mom sometimes. Not like in, “You look lovely today,” but more like, “What movie are we watching tonight, Lovely?” I guess it was better than calling her Baby. Lovely only halfway made me want to gag.

That first night she was home, I asked him how he knew it was my mother perched in that cage. The name felt like a coincidence. He said it was the way she was looking at him. She had intelligent eyes.

#

When she was alive, Mom had all these little adages she’d recite, like she was dispensing wisdom from the lines she’d read in a fortune cookie. When I’d complain about inheriting her frizzy hair or when acne sprouted across my forehead, she’d say, “What would you rather be: pretty or smart?”

The answer was smart, obviously, but sometimes I curled my face into the ugliest frown possible and yelled, “Pretty!” I thought the question was her way of making me okay with the fact that I wasn’t much to look at, but that’s not the kind of thing you want to hear at twelve years old. Whenever I answered that way, her eyes narrowed and her hand twitched so I could tell she wanted to slap the frown off my face.

Which she did once, actually. I was thirteen and just starting to recognize the potential I had for cruelty. We were in an argument, and I said I loved Dad more, which wasn’t a lie but still hurtful to admit out loud. The pain was immediate, registering even before the thwap of her open palm against my cheek. Tears blossomed in my eyes, and Mom sucked in air sharply between gritted teeth.

Later that same night, when I was walking from my room to the bathroom, I heard my parents’ muffled voices from down the hall. I stopped and held my breath. Mom sounded like she was crying; Dad, like he was soothing her. She said the words, “I don’t have the patience to be a mother.” At the time, I interpreted it to mean she didn’t have the patience to be my mother, and maybe that’s what she meant. It hurt in a physical way.

Right away, Lovely seemed to dislike me. She refused to climb on my arm when I stuck it into her cage. She eyed me suspiciously whenever I refilled her feed. When Dad placed her on my shoulder, she squawked and bit my earlobe, drawing the tiniest ruby of blood.

“Lovely hates me,” I said.

“You know how your mother gets sometimes,” he replied. He was still making excuses for her, even after she’d died.

“Mom didn’t even like birds,” I said. “She thought they had beady eyes.”

He responded that you don’t get to choose what you come back as.

He wasn’t Buddhist before this. He wasn’t anything. We never went to church, and the one time I asked my parents if we were Christian or something, Mom said she was allergic to organized religion. Back then I believed it was something you could be allergic to.

Once Dad found Lovely, he started reading all sorts of books about reincarnation. Our kitchen table was stacked high with titles like Modern Buddhism and The Cyclical Soul for Beginners. Sometimes there was barely enough space to eat your cereal.

There’s one thing I remember vividly from being a child. Not that some people wouldn’t still call me a child, but you know what I mean. I got sick and couldn’t go to school. Fever and chills. I must have been seven, maybe eight. It was memorable because Dad was the only one around taking care of me. Mom was sick and had to be away for a few days, and at that age the only kind of sick I imagined was the same kind I was. I ate buttered toast and sucked on Otter Pops and mostly lay on the couch, staring blankly at the TV.

The next thing I knew, I was waking up in Dad’s arms. He was asleep sitting up, chin resting against his chest and breath tickling the hair stuck to my cheek. He snored lightly, and he smelled like Altoids and shaving cream when I nuzzled back into him.

I did not think once about my mother.

#

Sometimes I think about the things I miss about my mother: the way, when I was really little, she’d make pancakes in the shape of Mickey Mouse’s head; when she ran her nails along my spine and made hushing sounds like the ocean whenever I was sad and she was in a caring mood; the fact that she insisted you could eat cupcakes for breakfast on your birthday; the way she smelled, her perfume like vanilla and jasmine.

I roll out those memories like a carpet in my mind because it makes it harder to remember the days she was irritable and sharp: when she’d pinch the flab on the back of my arm to remind me not to eat so much; the disagreements about what to have for dinner that ended with her muttering brat or bitch in my direction, depending on her mood; the times I made her cry just by leaving clothes in the dryer to wrinkle, or by eating the last of the trail mix. One time we fought so bad she screamed, loud enough I was sure the neighbors could hear, “One day I’ll be gone, and you’ll be devastated!” I asked her if that was a threat, but she just shook her head and said, “It’s reality.” Dad told me some people were just more sensitive than others, and that I shouldn’t take any of it personally. He said he didn’t take sides, but we both knew which one he was on.

The afternoon Dad brought Lovely home, while he was setting up her cage in the living room, I went into his bedroom and stood in front of Mom’s dresser. There was all her jewelry spread out on a glass tray, tangled necklaces and bracelets and her wedding band. I reached for the half-empty bottle of perfume and brought it to my nose, inhaling her scent. Later, Dad never mentioned the perfume was missing, which I took to mean he never noticed I hid it.

Right after the funeral was the hardest. You think it would have been the night she did it, but it wasn’t. Once the momentum of caskets and caterers and casseroles died down, I think Dad and I realized we had nothing much to say to each other. We were rarely in the same room for more than ten minutes, exchanged maybe three words at a time, as if oxygen was a scarce commodity. I took naps on the couch and ate buttered toast I made myself. A gaping, doubt-filled wound opened in that silence and made me wonder if I wasn’t partially to blame for what she did. It was like we finally figured out who was the family member keeping us sane and together, and it just so happened to be the crazy one who decided to die.

After the funeral, we snacked on leftovers from the gallon-sized bags we stuck them in: bland mini crab cakes, finger sandwiches with cucumber and cream cheese and the crusts cut off, water crackers growing brittle and stale. When that ran out, Dad left money to order pizza. I took it to the market instead, figuring it would be nice to have a meal that didn’t feel so sad.

I had this idea of all the things Mom would make when she clung to the right side of sanity: tofu stir-fry on beds of fluffy rice; glass dishes brimming with bubbling enchiladas; chicken parmesan, centimeters thin. My knowledge of cooking was limited to boiling pasta, so I decided to make spaghetti with meat sauce, but I forgot the ground beef, so it was just spaghetti and a jar of Prego. Dad ate standing at the kitchen counter, absently bringing forkfuls of pasta to his mouth. I took my plate to the dining room and sat down with a placemat and a napkin on my lap because that’s how Mom always told me to eat. We’re not animals, she’d have said.

Dad seemed happier with Lovely around. And maybe that was enough for him: just believing this parrot was my mother reincarnated, even if it wasn’t real. He hummed while he washed dishes, Lovely waddling on the counter and bobbing her head, reaching her beak to pop the occasional soap bubble. He’d watch TV, nestling her in the hollow part of his chest right below his ribcage. I imagined her rocked gently by his heartbeat. I’d watch them while I was supposed to be finishing up homework, and the distance between us felt unbridgeable.

You’d think it’d be impossible to hate anything that made Dad so happy, especially after seeing him so sad. But I hated Lovely in those moments. I hated him, too.

After school when I’d get home, I’d drop my backpack on the floor by the coffee table and open the door to Lovely’s cage. At first, she would only stare down at me from her perch inside the cage, or climb on top of it for an unobstructed view. I’d sit on the couch and ignore her marbly glare. Eventually, she got more comfortable, and sometimes she’d flit to the coffee table or the opposite arm of the couch. She’d turn her head sideways to fix one eye on the TV, like she was really watching with me.

One day I turned to her and said, “You’re not my mother.” She stared back uncomprehendingly. “I’m. Not. Your. Mother.” I enunciated each word. Lovely gave a noncommittal squawk.

I started repeating the phrase every time I came home, right before I opened her cage. And soon I started adding: I’m not your wife. My fingertips buzzed each time I said it. She didn’t repeat after me, but it still felt good to say.

She only knew a few words, even though I read on the internet that her species could learn up to two hundred. She could squawk “hello” and “good night.” She said “beautiful day” regardless of the weather outside. When she ate, she sometimes trilled the words, “yummy, yummy.” I don’t think she understood what she said, at least not in the way humans do. She just repeated sounds back to you. Parrot is also a verb.

#

It’s embarrassing, admitting that your father thinks your dead mother has come back as a parrot. There isn’t a natural way to bring it up in conversation. I stopped having friends over, not that I invited many people over to begin with. It was always a gamble, predicting how Mom would be on any given day.

Lovely’s stuff had taken over all the common areas. We spread old newspapers on random counters or decorative tables, seeds and occasionally bird shit scattered over the crossword section or the obituaries. Small reflective, jingly toys hid in the nooks between furniture or on high places: tops of bookshelves, above the refrigerator. Her giant wire cage occupied most of the space in front of the living room window. Dad draped a towel over it at night to keep it cozy and dark.

I asked him why he didn’t just sleep with the bird in his bed. It was his wife, after all.

She’s still a bird, he said. We need to take care of her like one.

My real mother sat in a bronze urn on the mantel, along with a picture of her where she looked happy and young. I guess she’ll always be young in my memory.

Sometimes Lovely climbed onto the mantel. I think she liked the height of it, that she could see the whole room from that perch. When she stared down at me from that height, her gaze condescending and cruel, I said all sorts of things. I hate you. Bad mother. Bad father. Coward. One day I asked, “Why?” because I wanted to know. Obviously, Lovely didn’t answer. She was just a parrot.

Once she did say my name. Not your fault, Allie, she squawked. I thought it was my imagination until she said it again. It rocked through me. I mean I actually did rock back on my heels, my body recoiling at the sound of it. I pictured Dad whispering it to her after I went to bed, patiently, until she could say it back. I wasn’t sure if he was trying to make it sound like my mother really was inside of our parrot, or if he was trying to tell me himself. I wondered if, in those moments when they were alone, she told him all the things I said to her.

After a month I thought about giving up on trying to teach Lovely anything. She never repeated the words I said, maybe because she was a dumb parrot, or maybe because she had a resentful personality and hadn’t liked me to begin with. I muttered dumb bird a few times when we were on the couch together. Then one Saturday morning while Dad brewed coffee and I sipped on orange juice, she started whistling from her cage. The words dumb bird repeated twice.

The sound of Dad setting his coffee mug on the counter pulsed through my chest. “You know,” he said, “She’ll be repeating that forever.” My face grew hot. Lovely said it again, and then added, not your fault, Allie. It felt like betrayal. Dad left the kitchen.

Sometimes I think about the things I miss about my father from before, and the list is short: how he’d drive me to elementary school on Fridays and we’d stop at the donut shop for breakfast; how he’d play Jackson Browne so loud it echoed through the house whenever he cleaned the grates of our stove; how, after Mom had days so bad she’d be in her bedroom and I’d be in mine, the air in our house taut as a rope about to snap, he’d come to my room first, even if it was only for a minute, to tell me he loved me, and that she did, too.

I take the bus to school now, our grates are crusted over, and Mom isn’t here to fight with me, so there’s no reason to remind me of her love. Or maybe he can’t say it because he isn’t sure himself, anymore. And maybe she did love me, love him. It just wasn’t a good enough reason to stay.

#

By June, we’d had Lovely four months, except it felt like we’d always had her. It was easy to settle into the routine of her needs: water, food, time to roam the house, clean cage, repeat. I didn’t think she hated me anymore, and I didn’t completely dislike her, either. We’d both come to accept that we were part of each other’s lives, I guess. I started wearing Mom’s perfume and saying, “Pretty bird” when I walked by her cage. Lovely cooed, “Yummy, yummy.” It made Dad happy.

He still came into the kitchen some mornings with puffy eyes, and we still hadn’t figured out how to really talk to each other. But at least we were beginning to exist in the same room together, even if it was only to look at the parrot. Things got incrementally better, like someone turned the temperature up by half-degrees every week. We didn’t realize when we’d stopped shivering, but now we were comfortable and warm.

He’d ask me about school, and I’d ask him about work. When I made a joke I’d read online about parrots, he laughed for the first time in months. I told him I was still sad about Mom. That I was still angry. He hugged me so hard I smelled his shaving cream, and his breath smelled like Altoids when he said he was sometimes angry, too.

One lazy August weekend, Dad said we should watch a movie together. It was nearing the one year mark, but we pretended not to be keeping track, tiptoeing across the fragile harmony of our new lives. We sat on the couch, and he scrolled through options. The windows were open, a gentle evening breeze scattering the heat. Lovely was preening herself on the mantel. I guess she caught her reflection in Mom’s urn; Dad had been polishing it that afternoon. She walked over and chirped, ruffled her feathers, and then squawked.

“Dumb bird,” I mumbled, and Dad shot me a look.

Lovely opened her wings and squawked again. She was really angry. Dad got up and put a hand over the urn to block her reflection, offered his other closed fist to Lovely. She climbed onto his wrist obediently. When he sat back on the couch, the urn had the tiniest blot from where he’d placed his hand.

“You smudged Mom,” I said, going to wipe it with my sleeve.

Then Lovely said it.

I froze. Dad inhaled sharply. I willed her to just shut up.

“Not your mom,” Lovely repeated. Then she said, more confidently, “Not your wife.”

Dad stood up, gently scooping Lovely off his shoulder and placing her on the back of the couch.

“I’m sorry,” I said, tears already stinging behind my eyes.

He didn’t say anything, just walked toward the kitchen. His keys jangled, the back door opened and shut. His car rumbled to life in the driveway and drove off.

I tried not to care, but my stomach burned. It spread until my whole body was on fire, and I felt like I was going to be sick or maybe die. Mom echoed off the walls of my skull, telling me how devastated I would be when she was gone. Maybe she knew, even then, how she’d end it. That she’d have the final say, always.

I turned to Lovely and opened my mouth so wide I was sure she could see all my teeth in that dark cavity, and then I screamed until I didn’t have the breath to make another sound. She didn’t even fly away, just stared back at me like the dumb bird she was.

I shivered and flung myself onto the couch. A pillow pressed firmly into my face, absorbing my tears. I don’t know how long I was like that, shivering and drowning in snot. At some point the cushions moved under the weight of small claws. A beak nuzzled my hair. Lovely cooed, “Shhh. Shhh.” She sounded like the ocean.

I turned around slowly, and she was looking at me with one eye, head tilted. I lifted a shaky finger to stroke her head, her wing. Her feathers were so smooth.

I took one deep breath, then another, until I was sure I was not going to burn alive or die. I counted certainties.

One: Mom chose to leave us, and there was nothing we could do except live with it.

Two: Dad would come home soon, and he would forgive me for the things I said to him through our parrot.

Three: I would forgive him for all the ways he let her hurt me, and I mean not just physically.

Four: one day, a very long time from now, we would hopefully learn to forgive her, too.