Sparrows by Bruce Meyer

Bruce Meyer

Sparrows

Margot told me her father was God. She’d been watching television in the family room, her chin propped on the back of her hands as she lay on the broadloom. A bird thudded against the picture window. The impact left a smear. She ran outside to see what kind of bird it had been. A sparrow lay on its back on the ground, fluttered its wings helplessly, then stiffened. She screamed. Margot’s father, a doctor, heard her cry out, and ran from his study. He thought something had happened to her. She pointed to the sparrow on the ground. She tried to tell him the bird was dead, but the words wouldn’t come out. Her eyes were full of tears. Her father bent down, picked the bird up in the palm of his left hand, and with his right index finger began tapping on its breast, a steady, soft beat, faster than Margot’s heartbeat but gentle. He raised the sparrow to his mouth and with his thumbnail managed to pry open its beak and breathed into the dead body. She told me how she gasped and stepped back in awe. The bird awoke. Its eyes blinked rapidly and stared at her father. Then it spread its wings. Rather than fight the tiny animal’s impulse to be free, he opened his palm and settled the bird upright in his right hand as it spread its wings and flew away. “He really was God,” she said. “I had never seen someone give life back to a dead creature. We lived by a river. The picture window of the family room faced the shoreline, and the current flowed by as steady and mesmerizing as if one ripple chased the one ahead until they both vanished. That’s the way I think of my relationship with my father, the kind of futility where birds struck the glass and flew at it again and again thinking next time they’d enter another sky.

Perhaps they mistook the false sky for heaven or a way forward when there was none. But when my father gave that sparrow back its life, I thought a wall between us had shattered and I was in awe.” Margot stared at her coffee. The way she looked into the cup I had the feeling she was searching for answers in it. Black. Two sugars. The bitter and the sweet all in one small, crowded container. The story of Margot. “I really thought he was God,” she repeated. “Not long after that we were in a grocery store. A woman walked up to my father and shoved him, her hand hitting hard against his left shoulder. He pretended to ignore the woman. He didn’t topple or stagger.” “’You think you’re God, don’t you?’ she shouted. My father just looked at her with sorrow in his eyes, not pity but a gloomy empathy. He must have felt what she felt right down to the center of his soul, but he said nothing.” “Was it hard growing up as his daughter?” I asked, because we were sitting there in the coffee shop, being honest with one another, and sharing stories about our deceased parents in an effort to understand just who they were long after they could explain themselves to us. “God never explains,” Margot said looking up from the cup, her fingers sliding up and down the sides to feel the warmth. “God never explains. Maybe, if he were here today, maybe over a cup of coffee in a place where he’s certain no one knows him, where his chances of running into a former patient or, heaven forbid, a nurse who worked for him, are next to nothing, he’d try to make amends. He’d tell me what he thought. He’d be honest and say something for once. The problem is honesty and medicine aren’t compatible. A person is dying. He doesn’t walk up to the person and say, ‘Hey guy, nice knowing you.’ He never said what he could have said.” “Maybe that’s for a good reason. Bedside manner,” I replied. “A doctor does what he can, but sometimes that’s never enough. It was never enough for me. I was the incurable relationship in his life.” “I know you’ve said things about how rough it was to be his daughter.” “He wanted more from me than I had to give. When I was sixteen, he presented me with a typewriter and told me I could learn to type, just as if it were easy-peasy to learn to type, and told me I could improve my grades, had to improve my grades, by doing my reports and essays on it. Then he added, ‘Any idiot can learn to type.’ He was heading back down the stairs to his study.

“Was he calling you his sparrow?” I asked. “I don’t know. He just said, ‘sparrow,’ and the look he gave me wasn’t anger. I would have been happy if he’d started cussing me out. I almost took his head off. But didn’t react. He looked through me. He looked as if he wanted to see something on the other side of me, something that I had put behind me and wasn’t anymore.” “To be fair, he was probably dealing with lives he was trying to

save.”

“To be fair?” Margot said, and I could tell there was anger in her voice because I could see rage gathering in the corners of her eyes. I knew she didn’t want to be angry with me. Why should she? I was the friend she could have coffee with. I’d just sit there and listen most of the time. I usually didn’t ask questions. I was there to listen. Maybe I shouldn’t have tried to see things from her father’s perspective, but Margot gets very self-absorbed, self-absorbed to the point of rage sometimes, and I know she’s pointed that rage at herself in the past and that’s not good. “What’s fair? I wanted him to listen to my music with me. I begged for a guitar, so my mother took me out and bought me one and I was learning to play it. He shouted at me one night that I had to turn down my music or I’d be grounded for a week. So, I ran after him. I wanted to hurt him. He’d put a card in the guitar case, “Love to you from Dad,” and I held up the guitar and smashed it against the door of his study. He could have asked me why. He could have said, “You’re not getting another one.” Or have screamed at me. But no. Nothing. He put his head down into his files and did a little sweeping motion, the kind of gesture that says silently, ‘Go away,’ with his fingers pointed down. I wanted Margot to stop. Her eyes were filling with tears. I could tell she was suffering. People in the coffee shop threw us sideways glances. I think they wanted her to leave. A young guy with a beard looked up from his laptop. He shrugged then shook his head as if to say, “Tell her to stop. I’m busy with my work.” All her life people had been turning away from Margot. She’d fallen in love with a guy in her first-year university. She told me she really loved him. He wasn’t just handsome and intriguing. He was, and this was her word because it was from a time when the word meant something, ‘Groovy.’ She’d said her father didn’t ‘Dig him.’ The Sixties were a time of a ‘Generation Gap,’ when people of Margot’s age distrusted older people more than they ever had.

The groovy guy got high one night and beat her up. He beat Margot badly. She showed me how one cheekbone wasn’t level with the other side of her face. The beating was that bad. And she’d loved the guy. She’d told me it was what she thought love was – someone reaching across a distance, someone offering warmth and closeness that she mistook for love. Her father dropped everything he was doing. He drove three hours to her university town. When she opened her eyes, and her face was swollen and black so her eyes must have seemed like ‘two holes torn in a story,’ as she put it, her father was standing over her, reading her chart. He bent down to kiss her. She said it was too little too late and pushed him away. “Maybe he wanted to breathe into you just as he had done to the sparrow,” I said. She was silent. She turned and looked out the coffee shop window. People were passing by on the sidewalk. A policeman was writing tickets beside some of the cars and tucking them under the wipers. “There’s so much meanness in the world,” she told me. “So much…I don’t know…sometimes I’m not sure if this is the best place to live.” “You’re not thinking of killing yourself, are you?” “I tried once,” she said, her voice trailing off. “Sleeping pills. I was living with my first girlfriend. I didn’t think a girlfriend would rearrange my face. That guy gave me fractured cheekbones, a broken jaw, and a broken nose. My father arranged for the plastic surgeon. It was some guy he knew from a surgical convention or something. He wasn’t on staff at my Dad’s hospital. My old man said the surgeon played a mean round of golf, especially on the back four. I guess I was the back four. My teeth were also shattered. I took a handful of pills. My father showed up again.” “You look fine to me.” “It’s what’s underneath,” she said. “It’s what you can’t see. It’s what I loved or wanted to love and no one would make the effort to return it. Am I that hard to love? Am I that undeserving of love? Maybe you don’t get it, but in here, in my heart,” she said slapping her hand on her chest, “I feel what others don’t want me to feel and it is bloody lonely.” “But didn’t you say he was there when you woke up in the hospital each time?”

“Yes, he was there, but he treated me like a patient. I wasn’t going to let him kiss me. And when my first girlfriend beat me up and I came back to our apartment and my stuff was gone and there were just bare walls, I called him. I told him what had happened. All he said on the phone was ‘Oh.’”

“He did buy you new stuff, though.” “He did. I came home for Christmas. We were having dinner. Mom was dying, not quickly but slowly, and I said to him, ‘Hey, why can’t you save Mom? What kind of a doctor are you?’” “He took a bite of turkey, then set down his knife and fork. ‘We should go and visit her when we’re finished,” he replied. I said, ‘we could take her some dinner and have a nurse heat it up for us,’ but he said ‘She’s not eating any more. She is disappearing before my eyes.’ Not our eyes. His eyes. It was being done to him. And nothing could save her. She’d been the go-between for us. She’d bought me a new typewriter. She’d bought my first guitar that he took credit for, and my next guitar. ‘Play this.’ she said, ‘when he’s not around the house.’” Margot doesn’t touch her guitar now. She told me that she can’t play it without thinking of him and wanting his love and hating him in the same breath.

After our coffee, we both had to head in the same direction through the park, me to work and Margot to her apartment. There was an old man on a park bench. He was scattering bread crumbs for sparrows. They were pecking at the ground, and some, tamed, flew up and sat on his shoulders and arms. “They stay all winter. They never fly away,” I said. “I wish they would come to me,” she said. “It would be a miracle if I could feed them and watch them fly away.”