When I was a little girl, I used to love when my mother changed the sheets in my parents’ room. She would lift the drier-warm cloth over her head and throw it across the great expanse of bed- and I would squeal and dive under it, a quick visitor in a bright sheet-cave that collapsed over me. My mother would pretend to grumble, Bat-Sheva, get out from there, I need to make the bed. And I would pretend to agree and tumble off - only to dive in again when she threw the sheet across a second time. I could play the game forever, I never tired of it, and would only give up when the grumble in my mother’s voice became genuine, Bat-Sheva STOP.

Then years passed, and I forgot to play the game. And then more years passed and I forgot I had ever played the game. And then more years passed and I got Marlow. Marlow is my cat. Every time I get out the laundry bag, his butt gives a little wiggle. I throw up the sheet and he dives underneath, scuttling around in the little tent, attacking imaginary mice. He loves it. He can play the game forever, he never wants to stop.

One day I called my mom to tell her another one of those “my cat is so cute” stories. And she said, “you know you used to do that too.” And only then did I remember. And now whenever Marlow’s butt does that little wiggle and his arms flail out and he pounces tentward, I find that I can be in two places at once- throwing the sheet, and the little girl diving under it. Marlow is like a little me, and I had forgotten I ever was a little me. He helps me remember and that makes me grateful.

It was long past four am. We were resting for a minute on some stranger’s couch. Everyone around us was still dancing, a mass of bouncing, happy feathers and ribbons and funny hats. D turned to look at me, her eyes wide with joy. “I’m just so happy to be here.” She was covered in body glitter and handmade cardboard spirals. A glowing, beautiful figure of a girl. We were both nearly thirty. But this was New York. There was dancing to be had, and parties to crash. And there was a moment, surrounded by the thunder of it all, that we both gave a little sigh of thanks.

Back in the spring of ’08, young Bat-Sheva was denied both love and an impressive directing job, both positions having been passed on to some other young upstart. This weekend, the front page of the New York Times’ Arts section showcased the work of the director who got the latter gig, and found his work to be totally lame. The article spent a portion of its page real-estate faulting the man who hired the director for his bad decision-making. A much-hardened Bat-Sheva of autumn ’09, is not quite sure how to take this news. She is considering putting the article on her fridge. Or just forgetting about it and going back to work.

      I don’t know where I learned it, maybe in an episode of This American Life, but somewhere I heard that if a bird flies into your home, it symbolizes a soul.
     “So what does it mean if you bring the bird into your house yourself?” Katerina asked. I wasn't really sure.
This bird was flightless with a crooked right wing, a little yellow and black thing, so small you could crush it between your fingers. It was waiting to die outside our building, so Katerina just scooped the creature up and brought him inside. We made a nest out of an old box and some newspaper, filled a bowl with water and birdseed and watched to see what would happen.

     It’s interesting how such a tiny little animal can fill a house so completely. For a whole week this summer, Katerina fussed over him like a mother hen. She followed a careful distance behind while he hopped around the corners of the apartment. She went to the store and brought him back live crickets, then worried that he wouldn’t be able to catch them, she killed them by hand and placed them in his food bowl. He was a wild bird. I mean, he looked like a wild bird. But somehow he felt perfectly safe perched on her finger. At dawn, when he was tired of sleeping, he woke Kat up by jumping up and down on her shoulder. In the mornings we found her a bleary-eyed mother asleep on the couch in the living room so that the bird could hop all he wanted in her bedroom without waking anyone up.

     She worried over him, taping up his injured wing, an activity much like trying to tie a splint to a blade of grass. She protected him from Marlow’s predatory urges since our sweet, often skittish scaredycat had changed into a fearless hunter, pacing back and forth outside Katerina’s door, and she had a time of it, hiding the bird or the cat in various bedrooms or physically wrenching Marlow away when he took a swing at the little thing. The bird would invariably hop his way into some corner or get lost under somebody’s bed, so Kat had to crouch on the floor and move aside furniture and dusty shoes to find him.

     She found the whole experience so exhausting that at one point she drove all the way to south Brooklyn to drop him off at an animal shelter, only to be told that the shelter had a policy of euthanizing wild birds. So she gathered him in her palms and drove him all the way back home to north Brooklyn and reinstated him in the shoebox in her bedroom.

     We were three roommates, a cat and a bird. The house was full. And after the sad, empty silences of that long last year, I was grateful for it. We named him Milton and he provided many, many quotes of the day. Everything was funny when it had the word “bird” in it.

     But then. Well…. One afternoon, Katerina peeked into the box and found Milton slumped over, his whole left side paralyzed. We put him on the sunny spot on the window ledge while Kat called vet after vet, trying to find someone, anyone, who would take a wild bird. And then while she was on hold with the tenth veterinary clinic, we watched, watched his tiny little bird soul leave his body. Wooosh.


     First there was silence. Then I went straight into denial, “I think he’s still alive.” He was still so bright and beautiful. “Did he just breathe?” Kat went into her room and closed the door.

     Later that day, we held the burial. We made little shovels out of empty tin cans and found a corner in Mccaren Park to bury him, a vibrant streak of yellow feathers against the brown earth.

     “Do you want to say a word?” I asked Kat once the deed had been done.
     “The bird’s the word,” Kat said. And that was the quote of the day.

photo by Kat.
Milton.
Summer 2009.
May he rest in peace.

     I was in my room, trying to work. Kat was in hers, painting it the much debated shade of “ballet white.” Suddenly there was a shout and a crash, and then her door opened and she peered her head around the corner.
     “Whelp,” she said, “I can now cross off my list stepping-into-a-bucket-of-paint-with-my-bare-foot.”
     "Awww,” I leaned back in my chair. “It’s your bucket list!”

They say you should have a life that is full of good stories. And I think, so far, I’ve had a great many stories in mine. At night some times, I lie in bed and remember one until I fall asleep. Like that time we shot in Hilton Head and went down to the beach before sleeping. We waded out by the moon water, and I said, if you had told me a year ago that I’d be here tonight, I would have laughed at you. And then you said, if you had told me a month ago…

Other nights I lie in bed and remember stories that haven’t happened yet. Like the one where you show up in my city and say, I’ve missed you.

But of course, there is Brooklyn. And then, there is summer in Brooklyn.

     I was sitting in the sunbeam on the armchair, muddling in a friday heaviness; sleepy with sad. Katerina was sitting on the couch, dejected from her job search. “Bah,” I said, legs over the side of the chair, a scrooge in the sunshine.
     “Hmm,” she said.
     “Boo,” was my response.

We sat there a while longer in the thick heat, not saying much else. Katerina looking at something on her laptop, I looking at nothing.
     “You know what we ought to do?” she said after a while of this, after I had sighed twice and scowled out the window.
     “Burn some sage?” I said without looking up, my eyes closing a little at some new pessimism.
     “Burn some sage? I was going to say go to the beach.”
     “Oh…” I rolled over like a cat to the other side of the chair. “We could do that too.”
     “No, let’s burn some sage,” Katerina said in the way that makes me love her. “I like that idea.”

     “Wait, what are you going to do?” Zosia asked later that afternoon, while we hovered around a sauecpan piled with fresh sage from the grocery store.
      “We want to get rid of the negative energy in the house. Past roommates and our own sadness and stuff.”
     “Oh. Ok...” I could see her mulling it over. “Do I need to clean my room?”

     We opened all the doors in the house, the kitchen cabinets, the closet doors, then crouched on the floor in Zosia’s room and lit a match. Nothing happened.
      “It’s magic! “ Zosia laughed.
So we shoved the pot of fresh sage into the fridge to let it dry out and went around the house closing doors.

      Five days later, we found ourselves in the same place.
      “Boo,” I said from my spot on the armchair.
      “Hmm,” said Kat from the couch.
      “Bah,” I grumbled.
     “You want to do the sage thing today?” Kat said.
       I sighed. “I don’t know. Maybe.”

       We opened all the doors with much less vim the second time around and brought the saucepan into Zosia’s room. This time the herb caught fire right away, and delicious tendrils of smoke curled around the pan. We wafted the smoke around the closets, into the cabinet drawers, around the corners, taking turns holding it.
       “It smells like pot,” Zosia said.
     “You know we really should be using a feather,” I said.
     “Where are we going to get a feather?” Katerina waved the pan behind the shower curtain.
     “This is like college!” Zosia was laughing.
     I took out Marlow’s blue cat-toy: a giant over-sized feather, string still attached.
     “Oh my goodness, I love this house,” Zosia said at the sight of me, serious-faced with a saucepan full of sage and a giant blue cat toy, wafting pot-smelling smoke into Katerina’s dresser drawer.
     “Shhh,” I said, trying not to laugh. “Don’t tell anyone that we did this.”
     “You know, it’s cool that you want to burn sage and everything,” Zosia said. “But I really love living here. This is the happiest place I’ve lived in a long time.”
     So then there was a brief pause in the sage-burning while we “awed” and laughed and hugged and then finally put the saucepan outside to burn off outside our doorway.
     “Do you feel better?” I asked Kat. We looked around at our freshly saged apartment.
     “I don’t know, I think so.”

It was the very next day that Katerina found the bird.