Unclean Jobs for Women and Girls

MAGICIAN

After my older brother Keith lost his arm in a car accident, I bought him a bird. I thought it might be nice, the company and its bright color. He and I go to the same college and live down the hall from one another in the same apartment complex. We’re very different, though. We did not hang out much before his accident. Keith was an athlete and an alcoholic; I prefer chemistry and yarn.

Most of the girls he and his friends hung around with were beautiful. I’m not beautiful, although he told me once that I was. “Jean,” he said, “you just aren’t beautiful in a way that people notice. It’s comfortable, the way you’re beautiful. Your face always reminds me of home.” I don’t think home was what any of his friends were looking for. They wanted excitement. My face does not remind anyone of that.

When I take the bird into Keith’s apartment, it’s so dark that the bird stops chirping. “It is not nighttime yet,” I tell the bird, but it stays quiet and does not believe me. “I brought you a bird. It will cheer you up and make you feel better,” I tell Keith, but he stays quiet and does not believe me. Keith’s living room is like a reverse sundial; shadows shift to tell that time does not pass.

Whenever I go over to his place since the accident, I can feel my heart breathing and my lungs beating. Things are all messed up. The pulse of my breath makes a thin white cloud in the air. The room is too cold for a bird.

When I turn on the heater, its loud ticks sound like the restoration of life, and I set the bird down by it and put a towel over its cage. “It will be under there, when you’re ready,” I tell him. “Please do not kill it.”

Keith stares at me and I realize he’s looking at my sweater. “I knitted it,” I tell him.

He’s quiet for a second and then he laughs a little. “You should knit me something to go over the end of my arm where my hand used to be.” He smiles at my discomfort. “You should knit me a fake hand.” I want to laugh too, but laughing around Keith is like a foreign word I’ve forgotten the meaning of; I want to use it but worry it might be offensive.

Keith itches the air where his arm used to be, and he and I stare at the space for a long time. Sometimes I get the feeling that everything could be okay if I could make myself touch the new end of his arm. I sit down next to him but he folds his arm into his lap. “I hate birds,” he mutters.

“It’s colorful.” I sound assertive when I say this, but I’m not. “I’ll be able to hear it in my apartment down the hall, so we’ll kind of be sharing it that way.”

“Will you take care of it?” Keith asks.

His arm’s end is a dome of gauze. Touching it would be like patting the stomach of a soft doll. It would be like telling my brother, “This is you. It is different but it is you because I’m holding it right now.”

“For a while,” I say. We sit together until the shadows get darker but time does not pass, and eventually I take him by the upper arm. Its end now rests so close to me that I feel like it is listening to my heartbeat, and after more shadows I whisper, “I’m going to touch it now” and I do. Though it is soft and motionless, the feeling of it makes me want to run. My whole stomach turns. I stare across the room at the towel-covered cage and imagine it is all a trick: the towel will fall off the cage and inside will sit my brother’s hand and forearm. The gauze on Keith’s arm will shift until a tiny bird pokes its way out and flies down the hall, past my apartment, off far away to where all spent illusions return.