Even if short stories are not explicitly connected in a collection, although linked short stories are slightly trendy right now, their themes still can weave together connections. The connections in three stories in Megan Mayhew Bergman's Birds of a Lesser Paradise create a larger story of loss as the world grows older, but ties to nature and parenthood hold strong.
The opening story, Housewifely Arts, is narrated by a capable single mother who is her "own housewife", bringing home the bacon, cooking it, doing small repairs and dispatching snakes in the backyard as easily as she kisses her son's bruises.
One thing she couldn't do, however, was heal her mother of growing old, frail and feeble. She couldn't make herself keep her mother's parrot. But now her mother is dead and if she can track that damned bird down, she might be able to hear her mother's voice again. She also is tied down to a house she's trying to sell but which has been invaded by crickets. Getting away for the weekend will give the cleaners a chance to have a go where the exterminator has failed.
While she realizes she mourns the loss of her mother, the narrator is a fierce mother in her own right. Her precocious nine-year-old is her treasure:
I want to wrap him in plastic and preserve him so that he can always be this way, this content. To my heart, Ike is still a neonate, a soft body I could gently fold and carry inside of me again.
Her mother's voice has been preserved, not wrapped in plastic, but in that parrot, the one which sneezes like the narrator. She also has a mother's guilt:
The things my body has done to him, I think. Cancer genes, hay fever, high blood pressure, perhaps a fear of math -- these are my gifts.
The things that we pass on to our children -- even if we don't want to give them cancer genes and the like -- factor in the story
Yesterday's Whales. This narrator lives with a man who passionately believes mankind is killing the earth. The least we can do is not have children. Malachi personifies doom and gloom in young urban garb. Speaking to those he would convert, he tells them that "not having a child is the best thing you can do for the planet." He says this to a group of strangers knowing that his lover, the narrator, is pregnant.
Although she acknowledges the strain that the planet is facing, knowing she is pregnant has brought other things to mind:
We wanted the same thing, I think, an earth less taxed by human presence. But giving up on life now, I felt, was like leaving the party early.
But who, I wondered, but the strongest among us could hold those ideas in their heads and find happiness? Get out of bed in the morning?
Before reaching this epiphany, she travels from the D.C. area back to her grandmother's home in Maine, where the family gathered often during her childhood and which is empty now that her grandparents have died. She reads the letters her mother sent to her own mother, the narrator's Grandma B, as a young college student and setting up her own home. The narrator is moved to see that "their intimacy never faltered". Although she doesn't feel she and her mother are as close, they still can communicate practically in code and her mother does not let her down.
As the narrator looking for her mother's parrot and this newly pregnant woman know, parents -- mothers especially -- are an essential part of themselves. We carry on from them and they carried on for us:
Mothers, I believe, intoxicate us. We idolize them and take them for granted. We hate them and blame them and exalt them more thoroughly than anyone else in their lives. We sift through the evidence of their love, reassure ourselves of their affection and its biological genesis. We can steal and lie and leave and they will love us.
The people listening to Malachi at the end of
Yesterday's Whales are not the same as the parrot-loving mother in
Housewifely Arts, the grandmother in Maine or the father in the titular story of the collection,
Birds of a Lesser Paradise. The older ones live within nature. They are not like the younger people "who professed to love nature" but who "would be quickly lost within it." The narrator comes from women who instead pass on knowledge about kale and newly born whales. The whale calf's mother, her own mother told her, pushes the baby to break the water's surface so it can breathe.
Mae, the narrator in Birds of a Lesser Paradise, did not know her mother, who died when she was a baby, but she has been lifted to the surface to breathe by her father. They live on the edge of a swamp in a dying town. She has returned after studying conservation biology. Dad runs a bird-watching business and uses the things that were left behind as the others left town. He took years to make a golf course in the backyard.
A young man, Smith, comes because he wants them to take him into the swamp to see birds no one else has ever seen. He, of course, wants to look for the fabled ivory-billed woodpecker. Dad wants to believe he saw one when he was a boy. Smith wants to see one too, but says he doesn't know the difference between a goldeneye and a loon. "Is that important?" he asks.
Bergman lets the reader decide whether it's important. But it's not difficult to see what Mae might eventually decide. The swamp is in her, and going away to university only strengthened her view of people as animals:
After years of biology classes, every come-on was a mating call, every bar conversation a display -- a complicated modern spin on ancient rules. I didn't believe in altruistic acts -- I could find a selfish root to anything. ... I was taught that at the heart of all people, all things, lay raw self-interest. Sure, you could dress a person up nice, put pretty words in his mouth, but underneath the silk tie and pressed shirt was an animal. A territorial, hungry animal anxious to satisfy his own needs.
Although Mae and her father don't follow politics, I couldn't help but apply her philosophy to what is out there today. What connects Mae to the other two narrators is the strength of the bond between her and her parent, and how she derives strength from that. While her father salvages playground equipment and buys the abandoned elementary school to rent it out for birthday parties and artists' studio space, young Smith is a squatter living in an abandoned subdivision. Bergman doesn't have Mae draw conclusions about the differences between the two men now in her life, but it is easy to see them. Her father is part of where he lives. Smith is a user. He's not evil, but he's not a part of where he lives. And Mae is definitely his daughter:
When you camp in the swamp at night, you know there are bears. There are hundreds, and they smell you, and they're curious.
Everything sounds large at night -- raccoons, squirrels, a startled deer.
But nothing was as fierce and wild as me. I was furiously alive.
Mae cherishes what remains wild about the swamp and its ability to let her hide there. She knows it won't remain that way. But even as she wishes "for stillness everywhere", she lets the world in by opening windows.
Bergman, a Southern girl married to a veterinarian and now living in New England, connects the disparate parts of her background into the fiber of these stories. They made me think of my mother who raised three children while her husband was serving overseas, of my grandparents who made it through the Depression by knowing how to use the gifts of the land wisely, and of my child beginning university studies and what I have passed on. The stories made me think of the joy I had growing a garden while living in a climate more hospitable to beans and tomatoes than the irrigated vineyard countryside where I live now, and of camping near Yellowstone under the stars as a child and walking through woods where the summer sun heat poked through the branches near North Idaho's deep lakes. The stories made me think of how I should use that knowledge more often in the ways I think about what I see going on around me these days, and how they may help me hold true to the things that matter.
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