Read Online The Lovebird by Natalie Brown - Free Book Online
Authors: Natalie Brown
Tags: General Fiction
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bitsy beach town up the coast. Because she made the best floral arrangements in the county, customers didn’t raise eyebrows when they noticed she had used a pen to draw a mustache on her upper lip—an occasional addition to her grooming routine in which she delighted.
Among the crew there was none sweeter or gentler than Ptarmigan. At seven, suffering extreme nearsightedness and in desperate need of spectacles (a fact to which his mother, who had refused to name a father when she’d borne Ptarmigan at the age of fifteen, was oblivious), he sped on a borrowed skateboard down a steep hill in starry Los Angeles and smashed right into a jacaranda tree, which he hadn’t seen until it was too late. When the paramedics lifted him onto a stretcher, he was covered in hundreds of blossoms. They were, he said, “like little purple trumpets. I still like those flowers. They remind me of angels’ trumpets, and I was born in the City of Angels, and I think angels must have been with me that day, because I only lost the use of my legs and not my life.” Ptarmigan shared an apartment with his mom in the Kensington borough of San Diego. He stayed up late most nights writing plays because, he said, the defining moment of his life had not been the accident, but the first time he saw
The Glass Menagerie
performed by the theatre department at the university, which he promptly joined.
Despite the diversity of our backgrounds, we all had something in common. And it seemed as if the longtime loneliness we had each known would lessen the more we worked together toward our shared, if small, goals.
Still, sometimes I felt like the only one in the crew who had genuine and enduring empathy for the creatures we sought to help—a real piercing pain over their often pathetic circumstances. Even Simon, despite his passion for the cause, was oddlyindifferent to animals as individuals, which confused me. There were many nights I could not fall asleep, so fixated was I on the left-behind lovebird at Azar’s. Simon didn’t understand. “You’re sentimentalizing,” he said. And though Annette found the companionship of her plethora of plush whales and bears insufficiently stimulating and routinely asked for a “pet cat, bird, dog, fish, or turtle,” Simon refused. Pet ownership, he said, was yet another assault on the rights of animals. “The very idea of a ‘pet,’ ” he declared, “is totally offensive, comparable to keeping a human enslaved.”
“What about a hermit crab?” she suggested, sucking the bottom of her blond braid, hoping a crustacean might make the cut.
“No, Nettie.”
“Didn’t you ever have a pet when you were small?” I asked Simon one night after he had tucked Annette into bed with a stuffed chimpanzee clutched against her boyish breast.
“Yes,” Simon answered. “Rupert. Our beagle. He went with my father.” Then Simon told me that his dad had hastily packed his clothes, books, bowling trophies, shaving kit, and Rupert into his car and driven away from home for good one evening while Simon, his mom, and his big sister sat unawares through the usual Friday night services at Congregation Beth Elohim. They had all four of them licked sweet pancake syrup from their fingers as a family at eight that morning, and by eight that night they were a family no more.
That was the most Simon ever told me about his youth. He never spoke about the past, or about himself. The crew liked to speculate about Simon’s background and pose possible reasons for the gemlike quality of his character—as hard and impenetrable as it was radiant and alluring. And they had known for months that Simon and I were amorously involved, so we all gave up pretending otherwise.
“You’re good for Simon,” Bear said as we all exited theSea Breeze Cinemas, where I’d dragged the gang for a special screening of
The Misfits
—ostensibly to examine the problem of wrangling wild horses for deposit to the dog food factory, but actually, at
Among the crew there was none sweeter or gentler than Ptarmigan. At seven, suffering extreme nearsightedness and in desperate need of spectacles (a fact to which his mother, who had refused to name a father when she’d borne Ptarmigan at the age of fifteen, was oblivious), he sped on a borrowed skateboard down a steep hill in starry Los Angeles and smashed right into a jacaranda tree, which he hadn’t seen until it was too late. When the paramedics lifted him onto a stretcher, he was covered in hundreds of blossoms. They were, he said, “like little purple trumpets. I still like those flowers. They remind me of angels’ trumpets, and I was born in the City of Angels, and I think angels must have been with me that day, because I only lost the use of my legs and not my life.” Ptarmigan shared an apartment with his mom in the Kensington borough of San Diego. He stayed up late most nights writing plays because, he said, the defining moment of his life had not been the accident, but the first time he saw
The Glass Menagerie
performed by the theatre department at the university, which he promptly joined.
Despite the diversity of our backgrounds, we all had something in common. And it seemed as if the longtime loneliness we had each known would lessen the more we worked together toward our shared, if small, goals.
Still, sometimes I felt like the only one in the crew who had genuine and enduring empathy for the creatures we sought to help—a real piercing pain over their often pathetic circumstances. Even Simon, despite his passion for the cause, was oddlyindifferent to animals as individuals, which confused me. There were many nights I could not fall asleep, so fixated was I on the left-behind lovebird at Azar’s. Simon didn’t understand. “You’re sentimentalizing,” he said. And though Annette found the companionship of her plethora of plush whales and bears insufficiently stimulating and routinely asked for a “pet cat, bird, dog, fish, or turtle,” Simon refused. Pet ownership, he said, was yet another assault on the rights of animals. “The very idea of a ‘pet,’ ” he declared, “is totally offensive, comparable to keeping a human enslaved.”
“What about a hermit crab?” she suggested, sucking the bottom of her blond braid, hoping a crustacean might make the cut.
“No, Nettie.”
“Didn’t you ever have a pet when you were small?” I asked Simon one night after he had tucked Annette into bed with a stuffed chimpanzee clutched against her boyish breast.
“Yes,” Simon answered. “Rupert. Our beagle. He went with my father.” Then Simon told me that his dad had hastily packed his clothes, books, bowling trophies, shaving kit, and Rupert into his car and driven away from home for good one evening while Simon, his mom, and his big sister sat unawares through the usual Friday night services at Congregation Beth Elohim. They had all four of them licked sweet pancake syrup from their fingers as a family at eight that morning, and by eight that night they were a family no more.
That was the most Simon ever told me about his youth. He never spoke about the past, or about himself. The crew liked to speculate about Simon’s background and pose possible reasons for the gemlike quality of his character—as hard and impenetrable as it was radiant and alluring. And they had known for months that Simon and I were amorously involved, so we all gave up pretending otherwise.
“You’re good for Simon,” Bear said as we all exited theSea Breeze Cinemas, where I’d dragged the gang for a special screening of
The Misfits
—ostensibly to examine the problem of wrangling wild horses for deposit to the dog food factory, but actually, at
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