Chapter 14 Red-Winged Blackbird
Fourteen
Red-Winged Blackbird
Agelaius phoeniceus. A beautiful bird with a distinctive three-note trill, the red-winged blackbird lives almost everywhere that suburban people
do, in meadows, prairies, fields, and marshes, but also suburban yards. And like those human dwellers, these birds can be
fiercely and even combatively territorial. A male red-winged blackbird is polygamous, sometimes with more than a dozen concurrent
mates, but things are not always what they seem. In some populations, half the chicks have a sire that is not the dominant
male. In folklore, red-winged blackbirds symbolize inner strength even when faced with change, as well as a masterful blend
of arts and justice. Although they’re not uncommon, the population of red-winged blackbirds is decreasing, but as Lennon and
McCartney famously sang with the Beatles, they are also resilient creatures, all their life, “waiting for this moment to arise.”
In the 1970s, cult leader Charles Manson, who, coincidentally, was always surrounded by a harem of young female followers,
believed that this song was about his murderous mission. In “Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird,” the poet Wallace Stevens
wrote, “A man and a woman are one/A man and a woman and a blackbird are one.”
I had lied to my parents.
Indeed, when Sam and I announced our engagement, I was pregnant.
All through the trial, unawares, I’d carried a stowaway, my daughter, the unknown agent behind all those bags of taco chips.
For more than four months, in a circumstance seemingly impossible for a modern woman, I had not noticed.
Like a sixteen-year-old in denial, I’d let the chaotic days and weeks unspool without counting.
Sam might have believed that all those birth-control slipups were so pre-2020s, and yet mistakes apparently still did happen—even when the window of opportunity, a single weekend, was opened only a crack.
After employing diagnosis by Google, because I was so ravenous and yet felt so full, I finally saw a doctor because I feared that I had diabetes.
In fact, we had Cornelia Bigelow Damiano—a name whose initials, Sam helpfully noted, were the abbreviation CBD, or cannabidiol,
one of the active ingredients in marijuana. I wanted to call her Claire, but Sam insisted that a clean break healed best and
hurt least. His grandmother’s name was Anna Cornelia Marie Messina, Granny Coco the namesake. We added “Frances” as a nod
to that birdy chapel where we took our first vows.
There was no black-and-white wedding, although there were black-and-white cupcakes. No champagne fountain, but there were
mimosas for everyone except the bride, who drank ginger ale with her orange juice and who never wanted to look at another
mimosa. My parents hosted a brunch for a few dozen people, catered by Fair Alice, the premier local restaurant, and I thanked
the universe because my mother would not be contributing any tried-and-terrifying culinary efforts.
Life is determined. Life strives against the odds to renew itself. It wasn’t the best way to start things off, we agreed,
until we saw her furious red face and assertive baby Mohawk. Then there was only Nelia, the very first firstborn, the light
of the world.
My long story appeared in Fuchsia, a story that, I will say, boosted the profile and circulation of the magazine to new heights, encouraging more of the same kinds of long features.
It wasn’t true what I feared, that all my friends were going to be strangers.
Instead, I heard applause from people who hadn’t contacted me in years—former colleagues, professors, grad school classmates.
I got two real job offers that were flattering if not tempting.
The story was reprinted in countries around the world, probably as an example of American decadence, but that led to even more attention for me, and ultimately to a book contract for which I stipulated a very long deadline to delivery.
The story began this way:
Women on trial for murder don’t wear pants.
In a simple navy blue shirtwaist dress, Felicity Wild walked into the courtroom, stopping only so police could remove the
shackles around her wrists. Her dark hair expertly cut in an angled bob, huge turquoise glasses framing her strange amber
eyes, Felicity looked like the homecoming queen she was once—not like an escort who killed two clients in cold blood.
Surreal is one of those words like survivor, too often said and too little understood. People throw it around when it doesn’t even really pertain to the circumstances:
Oh, I was literally thinking about you at the moment you called! Surreal!
This actually was surreal.
I was a couple of feet from Felicity, physically close enough to touch her, but unable to touch her—in a time and place that
neither of us could ever have imagined growing up.
We were best friends. From the private history you share, a best friend knows what each of your eye rolls really means. Sometimes
when you think something, you realize that the voice in your head is hers, not your own.
Writing that story was like a surgery for me.
I felt like I was betraying her, betraying myself, exploiting her, exploiting our friendship, like Nell said, because I could.
But still, it needed to be finished, and once it was finished, I recognized that, like a surgery, it hurt badly at first.
But in the end, even I could see that it had done me good.
Another year unspooled.
Sabrina Torres, my editor’s mother and bankroller, evidently decided that, just as my old friend Marcus said, Florida was
the new New York. She decided to move the magazine’s base to Florida and to build the purple pavilion in all its glory. She
would not be unmoved. So when Ivy was spirited away to become a TV Fuchsianista, always her first love, and I was tapped to take her place as editor of Fuchsia, I had mere weeks to decide, to create an expanded editorial plan, and then to organize my move.
I didn’t want to uproot Sam or leave Sam even briefly. I didn’t want to leave the Midwest. I didn’t want to leave my family
or my very few real friends—little though I saw them. There was a bid for me to teach writing at Sterling North College, a
small liberal arts school in Madison, which I now decided to consider. It was a real job, a tenure-track job, and though I
knew it might sometimes be dull, the duties sounded like money for nothing. If that didn’t work out, I could try my hand at
respectable PR jobs, finding something through my mother’s vast and clean network.
Then Sabrina made me an offer I couldn’t refuse, a figure more than twice the fictional salary I’d allowed my delighted, deluded parents to believe that I earned—back when I had fully seven hundred dollars in savings and got by only by regularly liberating cheese-and-mustard sandwiches from the office fridge.
If I sold my little warehouse digs in Chicago to the subletter who kept pleading for it, I would be sitting “pretty pretty,” which had become a family catchphrase after a little girl used it to describe the white tulle overskirt with the forgiving waist that I wore to my courthouse wedding.
When I played the Cornelia card, Sabrina stipulated a home office with a nanny stipend and an assistant.
So I signed a four-year contract with bonuses that would be fulfilled no matter what the fate of the magazine.
In Florida with my folks that long-ago Christmas break, during the interval when Emil Gardener and Cary Church were murdered,
I swore that, despite the fried grouper sandwiches, I would never live in that strange and tropical place, where the weather
was extraordinary but also some of the people were extraordinary in a different way, like extraterrestrials, every second
woman over the age of fifty with a face so blunted by Botox she looked like a Claymation figure.
Be careful what you don’t wish for.
Now I would live my real life in vacationland, where thick-skinned fruit you knew from only the produce section could be pulled
from a tree in your yard, where bugs that looked Jurassic never died but only grew and grew and grew. No more the harsh sun
on crisp brown snowy prairie grass, the restless skeletal finger-snapping of black winter branches. I would always long for
my Midwestern home, but it was not essential. What was essential would be there.
With reluctance that he took great pains to hide, Sam began looking for a job right away. Not two weeks had passed, however,
before Angela Damiano decided that, this being Florida, where you could throw a coin in any parking lot and hit somebody who
needed a defense lawyer, Damiano, Chen, and Damiano needed a satellite office there. Two of the firm’s finest elected to join
Sam, and he lured a young lawyer from Kelley and Hall who’d interned for him one summer, one Eleanor Bigelow.
Weeks passed, and while I had been terribly conflicted about living in a place I imagined populated only by drug dealers and senescent demagogues, the cartoon sunniness of the so-called Treasure Coast began to beguile me. It seemed to say, You can rest here. You can be safe.
That was the end of that. Or so it seemed. It was only the end of the beforemath.