Mantua.

Note #1: I started this at ARTSweek when I was eighteen years old and literally finished it this morning. It might be a little schizophrenic/way outside my current subject matter.

Note #2: It's pronounced Man-away, for the un-ohio initiated.

Note #3: Oh yeah, this one's long.


She had locked the whole house from the inside, snatched the spare key from under the mosquito coil on the back porch and released Bob Barker, her 80 year-old parrot, in the middle of the kitchen. Gary groped ass-up underneath the neighbors' hedges for an hour before he found the garden shears. Stabbing his way through the screen door, he almost wished he hadn’t found them at all: Bob Barker had picked up Carlotta’s nicknames for him over the years, and now the parrot was calling him a dickslap through the wire.

When he finally hacked his way into the house, the bird was squawking about Gary’s impotency and circling the lazy Susan. The contents of the spice rack were thrown into the bottom of a box along with the cutlery drawer and a sweating package of lunchmeat. Gary was silent as he nudged his way past the ransacked pantry and eased open the refrigerator. A bottle of mustard and three restaurant mints were the only survivors, shoved into the shadowed corner of the produce door. He thought of Carlotta, sitting in her locked bathroom aggressively filing her nails like a sniper swabbing her gun barrels. The mints were out: she would hear the wrapper crackling from a mile away.

Tiptoeing as best he could in CAT boots, Gary slid a chair back from the kitchen table and sat opposite Bob Barker. For a moment, the parrot simply cocked his blue head and stared Gary down, perched regally on the ceramic basset hound that served as a centerpiece. The bird’s solid black eyes were glossy and unblinking, daring him to defend himself. A long silence, and Gary reached cautiously for the stray dish of Gummi Bears Carlotta must have missed, set, cruelly, next to Bob Barker’s scaly right talon.

“Limp dick.”

It took him a moment to realize that the parrot hadn’t spoken. It imitated Carlotta’s voice so note for note that it was only when he registered the sound of bamboo mules on the linoleum that he realized she was there at all. The chair legs, he thought, but when he asked her how she had known he was there, she replied, “The whole goddamn city of Ashtabula can hear your stomach growling.” Then muttered: “Inconsiderate fuck.”

She ambled into his line of vision, her hands gripped hard against her hips and her hooked arms forming windows around two refrigerator magnets shaped like California raisins. “Would you like something to eat, honey?” she said, and gave a ringmaster’s swoop of the arms. “Let me show you our buffet. Let’s see here, we have a lovely selection of international spices…here’s some…canola oil…oh!” She flung open the refrigerator door. “Big spender’s upgraded from store brand mustard! Throw some garlic on this, we could feed a family of four.”

Gary kept his eyes on the plastic fish beaded around her ankle. “How’s moving out going, Car.”

Carlotta’s mouth clapped shut like an oyster shell. Bob Barker flailed his wings slightly and squawked “Nancy boy” on her behalf.

Gary sighed and rolled his head forward against his chest. He had spent the past nine hours flagging in red eyes on the Delta concourse, and his teeth were still grinding from the Mini-Thins. On the other side of his closed eyelids, Carlotta was stalking the room, and now the thump of her shoes was escalating into a cacophony of slammed silverware, scattering clove sprigs, her cherished Bahama wind chimes being ripped down. It had become an almost comfortingly familiar sound over the six months since Carlotta had started the process of leaving him, comforting in that it never ended her with leaving. Sometimes, she would go silent and stroke Bob Barker like an Egyptian queen while he begged her to stay. Sometimes, she would make love to him in the wreckage of her again unpacked boxes, rolling off the war casualty of a crushed Hummel figurine when they were done to tell him he disgusted her. But by the volume of crashing gravy boats, scattered beans and plywood cabinets being obliterated by a bamboo toe, he knew that wouldn’t happen tonight. It was the first time her rampage was loud enough to silence even Bob Barker. It was the first time he had ever mentioned her leaving without the words “don’t go.”

When he opened his eyes, Carlotta was already staring at him, the second of two mustard jars aimed squarely at his Adam’s apple. Gary shoved his chair back a foot.

“Lotta baby, it was just a question!”

Carlotta lowered the jar and gave him a “well isn’t that some shit” purse of the lips. “A question,” she said. “You can’t even feed us, you apparently killed a man with a pair of garden shears and now you try to kick me out of my own goddamn house when I clearly have no intention of leaving?”

As she spoke, she twisted the cap off the mustard and plunged four fingers in, slurped them clean. Her teeth still dripping orange, she oozed out the words: “We’ll I’m not leaving, Gary. You have an obligation to me now. You have an obligation to feed me more than goddamn mustard from now on.”

*******************

She bought the parrot from an estate sale out in Shaker Heights, the week after her one and only bonus from the DMV. It was an electrical fire; one of the old moneys had thought to make Sanka during a lightning storm, and had plugged the percolator in just as a power surge leapt through the wires. Janet MacAllister-Black had probably never imagined her picture appearing in the Star—or at least, not a picture of herself as a charred ink smear under the caption OLD WOMAN SPONTANEOUSLY COMBUSTS!!! CONSPIRACY??? She had probably never imagined her restored Victorian would be auctioned off to a strip mall developer instead of the Western Reserve Historical Society; she had certainly never envisioned her family bibles, her vibrating torso trimmer and one fifteenth of her exotic bird collection being sold to a woman like Carlotta.

For weeks, Carlotta spent every night in the middle of the living room gold-leafing a wire cage she had found at a consignment shop. “This bird has dignity,” she had told Gary when she first unbuckled the hole-studded air purifier box that contained Bob Barker from the passenger’s seat of her Dodge Omni. “I won’t say that’s the only thing we’re lacking around here, but it’s sure as hell one thing.”

She worked on the cage after dinner in front Nick at Nite, the room dark and her hands blue from the glow of the TV. Bob Barker watched from the corner—or, not exactly watched, but rather, shat uncontrollably and knocked his head against the yellow tarp that Carlotta had used to roof one of her niece’s playpens. He didn’t talk for the first three days, but when he did, it was to quote something neither Carlotta nor Gary could identify; a panicked rendition of W.H. Auden’s In Memory of W.B. Yeats.

Gary tried to like the bird. His arrival had signaled Carlotta’s first unexplained return after her first dramatically announced departure—a shouting match over her purchase of an aboveground pool (“It’s just a basic mod con, Gary. Do I not deserve the basic mod cons?!”) and a deafening exit, burned rubber and the bass turned up on a Tina Turner cassette. She hadn’t explained why she had come back or where she had gone, though Gary could picture her losing the cash she’d crammed into her gold lamé fanny pack in a Detroit casino and being ejected from a five star hotel she could never afford. She had spent most of her money and stolen almost a fourth of his yearly salary that week alone. He imagined her teased strawberry head bent over a craps table, her lime green nails fanning out towards the arc of the falling dice. It made his jaw tighten and a small vein along his temple tremble in a way that he was sure portended a stroke.

Still, after the first few days she was gone, the house got too quiet. Besides the TV, which he kept on all day, there was only the lonely clatter when he tripped on one of her potted cactuses, or fitness videos, or stuffed animals, or whatever else. It made something shift in his stomach that he couldn’t think about or name. The truth was, he didn’t know how to miss her, and when she came back, the feeling rushed out into his capillaries and stayed, a dull churning at the extremities of him.

She probably wanted him to plead with her, but Gary couldn’t bring himself to say much more than four words to Carlotta: Lean cuisine tonight okay? It was as if, when she left, she had planted an elaborate map of mines around the house, and any stray word or interrupted silence would turn the place inside out. Normally, he slept through the morning and afternoon in preparation for the night shift, but when she started to train Bob Barker to say proverbs, he found himself laying awake listening to the theatrical crescendos of her voice arcing through the wall. She still slept in his bed, but only when he was not in it; when he slid in at 6 in the morning, she neatly exited to the kitchen, where she began making her morning omelet and belting out Paradise City, or Whitney Houston’s Exhale, or one of her other favorites.

After a while, Gary began finding specks of gold leaf crushed into the welcome mat, sprinkled on the shoulders of his work jumpsuit like dandruff, floating along the swirl of pet milk in his coffee. Bob Barker had taken residence in his cage, but hadn’t taken to it; dull steel showed through in the places where the parrot had skinned them of their coating and the artificial flowers festooning the base were now covered in a thick layer of crap and bird spit. With the cage completed, Carlotta began her hesitant return to their shared bedroom and dinner table. At first, she ate the most efficient meals she could put together; dry Lucky Charms, Slimfast bars, raw baloney. When she finally worked her way up to microwave linguine, Gary risked talking to her.

“Goin’ to work tomorrow?” he said.

“The least you could have done was marry me in a church,” she said.

It was around this time that Bob Barker began to forget the “but-seek-first-His-kingdom-and-His-righteousness-and-all-these-things-will-be-given-to-you-as-well”s that Carlotta had so painstakingly taught him, favoring instead Carlotta’s own colorful vocabulary. She left again on the fourth of July, 1997; again, Christmas of the same year; an unspecific day, 1998, after Gary informed her that he was trying to sleep, and could she stop yelling along with the televangelist about the glorious splendor of God’s heaven.

He learned how to recognize the moments before she left, like an arthritic man feels the rain pulling at his hip joint or a Cherokee hears the tremors of a pissed-off bison stampede. As Carlotta flung the mustard jar against the table top, he could almost smell her leaving; the Sally’s Beauty brand mouse melting into the sweat along her hairline, the metallic twinge on her breath of someone who’s just sprinted a mile and is ready to spit blood. He had learned to expect the clumsy knocking of her walking too fast in heels, the suitcases as they slid off the top shelf of the hall closet and dented the floor, and her final words to him, normally along the lines of “where in hell is my damn beaver coat?” Next, she would wipe out the statues on the mantle with one swinging arm, then nudge the overpacked suitcase towards the door with both hands and both knees.

Each time, somehow, it got easier. He even had a routine. He would move to the basement stairwell where he could sit and watch, maybe counter an epithet with a “don’t say that,” though maybe not. He would wait until her taillights shrunk and finally dimmed into the darkness at the end of the road, and then he would walk down the stairs, put 40 lbs on each end of the barbell and lift and lift, until he couldn’t remember marking time any other way.

But always, 200 reps in or so, he would hear her voice. It would be a sweet thing, more musical than he was used to: Honeypie or Lovebird. Every time, there was a prick along his spine as he sat up a little, listening to Bob Barker sing out the nicknames that Carlotta had made up not for Gary, but for the parrot: their own odd breed of lovers’ Marco Polo. He’d like to say he knew it wasn’t her every time; he’d like to say that maybe these moments were why she always seemed to forget the parrot, though he knew it was more likely that she was in too much of a hurry to get out. He would wait, and watch the bird waft down the stairs and land on the end of the weight stand like a fluorescent blue specter of death. Then he would start lifting again, until his arms fell back limp, until the calluses on the heels of his hands buzzed with pain.

He was ready for it, for her to change her mind—his hands twitched into a fist, his fingernails searching for his palms. Carlotta stomped past him, futilely kicking at the loose doorframe as she rounded the corner out of the room. But the sounds that usually followed this—an inhumanly loud yowl, the shaking echo of the screen door jangling closed—these sounds did not come. Instead, he heard a set of slow, shifting feet, then the click of the upstairs TV dial as the volume swelled to an unmistakable 10. It was loud enough that Gary could distinctly hear Marie Osmond detailing the quality of a doll’s hand-made undergarments on the Home Shopping Network. It was not loud enough that he could not hear the sudden, bright gasps of Carlotta’s breath, the half-swallowed yelps of her crying. Her words were carved into the air she'd put between, a distinct and cursive void: I clearly have no intention of leaving.

Bob Barker hadn’t moved. One glassy black eye was set into his profile like a button ready to be pressed, and as he looked at Gary, it betrayed no secret thoughts. Gary slowly dragged his hand through the pile of uncooked rice she had thrown on the table, listening to the sound it made. There was a pulse of wind as the bird beat its wings and a few of the grains shivered off the tabletop. Other than that, there were all the same sounds, the kind of sounds that amount ultimately to white noise, the kind of white noise that turns to silence, the kind of silence that can kill a man if he’s not careful, if he doesn’t speak.

“If you come back,” he said. “Tell her I’m sorry. If you come back, tell her I knew about the baby, I saw the test in the trash, and that there’s $700 in a box in the crawlspace but that’s all I’ve got. I’m gonna stay until you come back, I want to, but if you can’t stay gone, I figure I’ve got to start believing in signs.” He paused, eased the window open. “But think about staying gone.”