Mister Jerry Is a Big One

Michael Byers

In the early morning light Georgia was sweeping the corners of the living room. It was Saturday. Down at the bottom of the hill a green bus, empty at this hour, pulled away from the curb with a soft patient sigh on its way uptown. It was the season for migrating songbirds, and this morning a dozen finches had perched in the thicket of Mrs. Gentian’s azaleas next door. Their song, repeated over and over, climbed its three brief steps up the scale before descending once—sweet sweet sweet? who!—with a penetrating clarity that Georgia herself began to feel, as she gathered and combined her accumulating bits of household dust. Her younger sister Mary could be heard treading heavily through the upstairs hallway on her way to the shower, and Mary’s footsteps seemed telegraphed to her through some very sensitive medium, as though the air were thicker than usual, and more apt to vibrate. In fact beyond the windows the yard was hung with a delicate, late-autumn haze, and the houses at the bottom of the hill drifted in it, wearing lighter and darker shades of gray.

While sweeping beneath the radiator Georgia discovered what appeared to be a very small dried-up man lying on his back among the pennies and dust. She bent over and picked him up. Not quite an inch long and very light, mummified by the past month’s radiated heat, he looked to be made of some vegetable matter: a mushroom stem, maybe, or the odd end of some houseplant or other. He was a harmless tawny brown color and had four very distinct limbs and a sturdy trunk, and a square, masculine head. His face, featureless, gazed at her blankly. He had no hands or feet. Georgia weighed the man in her palm: nothing. She put him on a shelf and continued her sweeping.

Her sister Mary was late getting up and arrived downstairs with a hangover. She wore a white robe and smelled of toothpaste, and her gold hair fell prettily over her long neck. Georgia handed her sister a cup of coffee and brought the newspaper from the dining room into the dim kitchen. “Well, good morning,” Georgia said.
“God, I had the strangest dream last night. We were on a camping trip,” said Mary, her head in her hands, “and we’d decided to have a contest, which had to do with one of us hitting a bullseye with a golf ball, and there were some other people there who kept trying to get me to go swimming, and I kept saying—” Mary stopped. “You know who was there? Eric. God, we were all there, you and Eric, and me and Mitchell, it was like the old days.” She swept her hair back. “Funny,” she said, “Mitchell kept trying to get me to get in the fucking car with him, but it wouldn’t start, and finally he gave up and started just honking the horn, waiting for somebody to come find us. How’s that for a metaphor. The whole time I had this feeling of ‘Wait, what am I doing here?’ like in those dreams when you’re back in school and you know you’ve got to take the test, and at the same time you know this has nothing to do with you, if you can only convince someone of it. Or yourself, I guess.”
“I fixed the car,” said Georgia.
Her sister said, after a second, “Actually, I didn’t mean to bring it up again. I really didn’t.”
“Well, but you just did, oddly enough.”
“It was a dream car! Really, honestly, I didn’t mean to.” Mary took her coffee and stood up. “I know it’s an issue.”
“They can’t do anything about the rattle,” Georgia said, “because they can’t hear it.”
“That’s because they’re a bunch of dumdums, Georgie.” Her sister’s voice had modulated itself maddeningly as she drifted toward the stairs again. She would drink her coffee, Georgia knew, then sleep for hours on top of the bed, wearing her clothes and seeming, in her blameless unconsciousness, a figure from a fairytale, someone who had wandered into the house and crept upstairs to be discovered later by the real householders. “We don’t have to keep going back there, you know, they’ll never notice. They’re not keeping track of us.”
“But they’re the only people who are at all nice,” said Georgia. “They’d notice.”
“They don’t actually know you’re alive,” said her sister, “or me,” she added, considerately.

They had inherited the house when their mother died, and not much had changed. The sisters, both recently divorced, had other things to think about. Georgia had been fighting with her husband’s lawyers for months and the idea of renovating the old place was too daunting for her to consider, even if money hadn’t been a question. Eric had all the money, and Georgia’s lawyers, an incompetent set of Irish brothers, could not figure out how to get very much of it away from him. She would have fired the O’Rourkes, but they were two old family friends, old men named Dominic and Demerest, and her doomed efforts to get results without being rude to them made her heart sink. Weeks would pass in silence; then one of the O’Rourkes would phone and in his sad old lamenting voice explain why nothing could be done at this time. Eric had put everything into a secret receivership. Eric had sold it all to his brother. Eric had filed a last-second continuance. The list of Eric’s devious evasions was spectacular and so unlike his usual haphazard maneuvering that Georgia suspected the O’Rourkes of lying, but she could not bring herself to say as much out loud. So she was going out every day to the office and coming home every night to her mother’s old house, where the master bedroom with the green flocked wallpaper and white lace curtains remained untouched, while a dark pool of grievances deepened in her, fed from the subterranean spring of her offended good manners.

It was a nice house. Georgia had fond memories of her childhood here, and it was interesting to be living with Mary again. Though they were in their forties neither had changed much, it seemed; Mary still flung herself around with guileless generosity and Georgia still did not. Her sister had always had more friends, more lovers, more energy, had them to spare, and so wasted them. And Georgia herself had never had enough of these things, and so had conserved herself for her best friends, and had been the attentive, forgiving curator of her own marriage. But here they both were, back where they had started. There was no rent, at least. Her mother’s ranks of yellow-ware bowls stood on the deep kitchen windowsills as they had for decades, each with its broad white military stripe. The old Heriz in the front hall had faded in a broad trapezoidal area where the years of sun had fallen on it through the fanlight; and a vapor of airy, invisible patience hung about everywhere in the downstairs rooms, where their mother had spent most of her life dusting and vacuuming and tending to things, and by now it seemed unkind to undo what little the dead woman had done in the world. Georgia at any rate was uncomfortable rearranging much, and when she did remove a Roseville vase or the gravid old Gruber clock for cleaning she seemed to see her mother watching out of the corner of an eye, wondering what she was up to. The damp and odorous basement was left to its own devices, the sisters venturing down only to do their laundry, and outside the yard had come down in the world, getting hairy and wild. Dandelions had established themselves in the brick walkway. But the lawn was always cut short: they had hired a boy to mow it. Months ago Georgia had stood in the garage looking at the old mower, a dark menacing thing layered in its own grease, and had decided it was something not worth bothering with.

Mary had been getting divorced from Mitchell for six months, Georgia had been getting divorced from Eric for eight months. When the telephone rang that afternoon it was Mitchell calling. Georgia found Mary where she had predicted: back upstairs in the master bedroom, lying poleaxed on the bed, fully dressed, with her yellow hair over her face. “It’s Mitchell, isn’t it?” Mary asked.
“I could tell him you’re busy making beef Wellington.”
“Ha,” said Mary. “He’s going to try to apologize, which is his way of taking all the credit for last night. Typical.”
“It happened again?”
“Sort of,” Mary said.
“You’re giving him mixed signals,” said Georgia. “No wonder he keeps calling.”
“I know! I guess I like him better almost single. He’s more—” She rolled and stood up and went to the desk, where she picked up the receiver. “Amenable,” she finished, her hand over the mouthpiece.
Georgia, actively reserving judgment, left the room. Downstairs, the doorbell sounded its two notes.

From the top of the staircase the bottom half of Mrs. Gentian was visible through the glass of the front door. Georgia froze. She could make it to neither the basement nor the back door without crossing the front hall, and if she stayed where she was, her shoes would eventually be seen perched on the top step. Worse, just barely, would be to have them observed vanishing into the upstairs bathroom. She descended and opened the door for Mrs. Gentian. “Hello, Mrs. Gentian,” she said.
“You poor dear,” she said, coming in. “I’ve been watching you, you haven’t been out of the house in days, except for work, and I don’t think going to work really counts as being out of the house, does it?” Mrs. Gentian was wearing a black-and-white striped blouse and white slacks, and her toenails, visible among the plastic straps of her sandals, were painted a dark, undead shade of gray. An old friend of Georgia’s mother, Mrs. Gentian was not quite seventy. She sat on the brown couch and crossed her legs. “And neither does shopping count, if it’s for necessities. You ought to have more fun. Like Mary does.”
“I wouldn’t call it fun, exactly.”
“Now listen: I have a dear old friend who has a son, his name is Freddy, and he’s just finishing a fabulous trip around the world, and from what I hear he’s desperate to find a wife. Never married, no kids, lots of money. I gave him your number.”
“Freddy Dumont?”
“You know him?” Mrs. Gentian’s face brightened. “Well, there’s a double blessing. Sometimes that sort of second chance can be very special. I mean,” she said, “love can just happen. I’ve heard all kinds of wonderful things about Freddy.”
“I went to high school with him,” Georgia said, “about a zillion years ago. He’s very, very gay.”
“Well,” Mrs. Gentian looked straight at her, “that’s not what his mother says. I don’t think we’re thinking of the same person.”
“No, he’s really extraordinarily gay,” said Georgia. “He lived with a guy for about twenty years, I think. Some guy from Sacramento. Wasn’t he a—a mailman or something?”
“We can’t possibly be thinking of the same person.”
“Isn’t that him?”
Mrs. Gentian shrugged. “Now, the other reason I’m here, sweetheart, I’m looking for Mister Jerry again. I left a window open. Any sign—?”
“Poor Mister Jerry,” said Georgia.
“Well, I know he’ll be hanging around somewhere nearby. If you hear someone pecking at the window, could you just open it up for him? Can you remember to do that? And then you can just call me on the phone, and I’ll come right over with the towel. I know it’s a nuisance, but he likes his freedom, I hate to keep him in his cage.”
“Maybe he’s back in the Amazon by now.”
“Oh, he always comes home,” said Mrs. Gentian, with a roll of her eyes, “he can’t stand to be alone. He wouldn’t know what to do with himself out in the wild, of course if you’d ever owned a bird you’d understand what I’m talking about. He’s from Antigua, I think I’ve mentioned that before.”
“Before I forget,” Georgia said, calmly, “you didn’t happen to bring back that pitcher?” It had been a valuable piece of her mother’s yellow-ware, one of the oldest pieces, with a clean, spare line and a pretty field of dark crazing. She suspected the pitcher long since broken; Georgia had lent it in the days after her mother’s death, feeling lovely and sentimental. “I’ve having the collection appraised.”
“The pitcher?”
“The pitcher,” Georgia said.
“Oh, the pitcher! Well, I don’t have it with me, sweetheart,” said Mrs. Gentian. “I don’t walk up and down the street carrying dishes.”
“But you carried it home with you in the first place,” Georgia pointed out, not too gently. “It’s only twenty feet across the lawn.”
“I suppose you’re right,” Mrs. Gentian said, with a little sigh. Ten seconds later she was standing at the door. “I’m sorry to have bothered you,” she said, turning the knob. “Mister Jerry is the small, small, sort of reddish one.” Mrs. Gentian went down the front steps. Soon she heard Mrs. Gentian’s front door close. In fact it was Mrs. Gentian who never left the house; they both knew that.

Georgia turned on the television and a few minutes later, during a commercial, she went to look on the shelf for the little mushroom man, but he was missing. He had been right here, and now he was not. She bent down to look under the shelving, but the floor was clean. She pulled back the edge of the carpet. Knowing it was no use she pulled off some books to look behind them. It was odd, as though he had got up and walked away somewhere. The idea was a little frightening. What if there were more of them, more little men? A noise came from the kitchen doorway, which was obscure in the dim indoor light. She stepped forward and, reaching in quickly, turned on the light. She saw nothing. On the kitchen island a bowl of bananas was going spotty. Upstairs, Mary could be heard in the shower.
She put on some water for tea.
The telephone rang. “Don’t hang up,” said her ex-husband.
“Oh, Eric. I imagine you’ve got money for me.”
“Can I talk if I don’t?” His voice was reedy, quick with the useless cleverness that had been so attractive at first, much less so later.
“I’d rather you didn’t,” she said, “but I guess I can’t stop you.”
“Really?”
“Go,” she said, “talk.”
“I want to talk with you, not to you.”
“All right,” she said, “what would you like to talk with me about?”
“Well,” said Eric, preparing.
“You understand we’re divorced, Eric, that means we don’t have to talk any more, ever. Isn’t it nice? You don’t have to explain anything to me ever again.”
“Well,” he said, not quite as hopefully.
“You don’t have to justify any particular behavior, you don’t have to ask forgiveness for anything, you don’t have to ask for my trust back, you don’t have to have anything to do with me whatsoever.”
“It’s about my mother,” said Eric. “She’s very sick.”
“I’m sorry to hear that,” Georgia said, “sort of.”
“I just needed to talk to you.”
“Not with me?”
“With you.”
“What you mean is, Eric, is that she’s the only woman in the world who really cares for you right now, and soon she’ll be dead.” She felt a rhetorical grandeur blossoming; Eric often had that effect on her, now that they only talked over the telephone. “Eric, it’s such a nice feeling. Honestly. Everything in the world is very simple all of a sudden, I feel so much cleaner now. I don’t think I’ve actually used my brain in the last twenty years and all of a sudden I’m discovering I can think again because I don’t have to use half my brain to block out what I don’t want to see. I think you should go tend to your mother and maybe don’t call until you have some money for me. Maybe she’ll leave you some in her will. Come to think of it, we’ve both been waiting for your mother to die for twenty years, haven’t we? Won’t you be happier when she’s dead, the old—thorn bush, or whatever?”
After a beat he said, “That’s a cruel thing to say. I don’t think you’re doing very well at all. You wouldn’t have said that before.”
“No, I wouldn’t have.” The starkness of this briefly frightened her. She had never said such a thing before. So: she was no longer married. It was a fact. She had no choice but to push forward: “It’s certainly what I’ve been thinking. It’s what you should be thinking, too.”
Her husband took this in. “Are you really happy, Georgie?” he asked.
“God,” she said, exulting, before she could stop herself, “you wouldn’t believe it.”
“I don’t think you are,” he said, “I think you’ve changed.”
“Well, of course I have.”
“Not in a good way,” he concluded, and hung up in her ear.
In the kitchen, the kettle was beginning to rattle.
A moment later it occurred to her that Mrs. Gentian had somehow managed to steal the little mushroom man from the shelf on her way out, and a solid thrust of hatred went through her. She looked around at the air in the living room, at the ceiling, at the upper corners of the room. No, that was silly, of course Mrs. Gentian had done no such thing.

Mary came downstairs again with her hair wet and wearing her jogging outfit. “Did the phone ring?” she asked.
“Eric.”
“You should try it,” said Mary.
“Not on your life.”
“You should. It’s nice, once they don’t have a claim on you any more. They’re very different, you know, they go back to the way they started out. It’s fun.”
“No, no, no,” she said, “Eric never does anything for the enjoyment of it. It all has to do with discovering who’s at fault. Which would be me, for giving in to him. Plus,” she added as kindly as possible, “I’ve made up my mind.”
“Meaning me? But okay, you might enjoy it anyway. Stringing him along, you know? Not that I’m that big a fan of Eric.”
“I like having the upper hand,” said Georgia. “I can take the high road.”
“Not much fun on the high road.”
“I don’t know,” Georgia said, “I think it suits me.”
“Oh, shit,” Mary said, going to the door, “it’s raining.”

After Mary had gone Georgia made a sandwich and sat down at the kitchen table. She ate slowly, listening to the gutters drip into the garden. Mary would be gone for at least an hour and she had the house to herself. Stringy pieces of chicken lodged between her teeth and she spent some time plucking at them with her fingernails before going off to get the floss. Back downstairs the mail arrived, and she retrieved it and spread it on the table beside her empty plate. There was nothing of note but she studied the flyers and circulars before gathering them all into a pile and sliding them into the recycling bin. As she did she seemed to hear a shuffling sound coming from behind her.

She sat down to listen. A moment later it came again from the basement door. She went over and peered down into the black. The rustling sound came a third time, and this time she heard a voice as well, a soft definite cajoling voice as though someone were talking to himself down there in the darkness of the basement. Frightened, she turned on the light. The stairs dropped away before her, dimly.

She was a reasonable woman, and she knew it was a ridiculous idea that the little mushroom man had got up and walked downstairs and was now perhaps at work at something. But in her fear she felt it was as likely an explanation as any. She took a plastic container from the dish rack and began creeping down the basement stairs. As she descended, she heard the voice again. “Victor,” it seemed to say, in a whisper.
Soundlessly she reached the bottom.

The shuffling was coming from the furnace room, and she tiptoed in that direction. A smell of insulation lifted from the boiler, scenting the heated air, and the furnace itself throbbed and exhaled ominously, the dark old heart of the house. Georgia, plastic container in hand, peeked around the doorway. Inside the furnace room she saw not the little mushroom man but Jerry, the bird, walking back and forth rapidly on the concrete floor beneath the high basement window, wearing the grave and disappointed expression of a man late for a meeting. Now and then he rearranged his red feathers. “Jerry,” she said, relieved.
The bird glanced at her, surprised, and said, “Too bad. Too bad.”
“How the hell did you get in here?”
“Mister Jerry is a big one,” said the bird.
She approached with her container. “This won’t hurt at all,” she said. Swiftly she dropped it over him and maneuvered the lid beneath his black feet. He tumbled a bit, and on her way upstairs he slipped this way and that. “It’s all right,” she told the bird, and turned off the basement light and shut the door.
Once back in the kitchen Georgia set the container on the table. There she regarded Jerry briefly. He seemed perfectly unconcerned, sitting contentedly in his coat of reddish-brown feathers, looking back at her with his sharp black eyes. They looked at each other for a minute. Then with a swift movement of resolute finality Georgia stood up, opened the freezer, and put him deep inside behind the frozen soup.

Some minutes later the telephone rang. It was Eric again. “Georgia’s not here,” she said.
“Stop it,” he said. “I’m serious.”
“She’s not here, Eric. She’s cleaning out the garage or something, she’s doing something useful with her life.”
“Oh, Georgie, what am I going to do?”
“For chrissake, stop it.”
“I never want what I have. I’m always looking after the next thing. Or the last thing, in this case.”
“You’re unhappy with who you are,” said Georgia, angrily. “You’re never really dissatisfied with who you’re with, you’re dissatisfied with yourself, because you think you deserve more, and that you’re somehow failing if you accept whatever good thing’s right there in front of your face. I was a good thing, and you couldn’t see it.”
“I know.”
“Well, grow up. You can’t go on the rest of your life just longing for things like an adolescent. Sooner or later you decide on something you like well enough to make it last. Don’t you get tired,” she pleaded, “of all that longing?”
“I want you,” he said. “I know it now. I want you.”
There was a brief fluttery commotion from the freezer. “You want me,” said Georgia, “because you can’t have me. If you had me, you wouldn’t want me any more. That’s how you work.”
“But I mean it this time.”
“Of course you do. It makes you a romantic. But that’s the easy way to be romantic, sweetheart. The child’s way. The hard way is to get up every morning and be romantic with someone, with the person next to you. That’s the hard thing.”
“Oh, God.”
“And stop that hangdog act, that doesn’t cut any ice with me as you very well know. Go find that other woman right now, whatever her name is, Piccolo, and do something nice for her. And you’d better hope she doesn’t know you very well yet and that you’ve still got time to save yourself. Go on. Go.”
“But there isn’t anyone else. Anymore,” he added.
“Where’d she go?”
“I’m so sorry, Georgie.”
“Well, stop it. Stop being sorry. Do me the honor of having made a serious decision. Where’d she go?”
A long dark pause. “There’s no one else, Georgie,” he said, gravely, “honestly.”
“Oh, that’s your lying voice! There’s some floozy named Piccolo with big tits and a Ph.D. who’s sitting right there! That woman from the Willowbys that you liked so much!”
“What can I say to convince you?”
She heard the terrible, genuine sadness enter his voice. “Absolutely nothing,” she told him quickly, fearing she would cry, “you’re not really a man, Eric, you’re just an old selfish boy.” She hung up.

There came another brief commotion from the freezer, and then a long time passed in silence. Georgia watched the freezer door. Poor, errant Jerry late for his meeting. And in the end Eric was not to blame, really, for his stupid, childish, over-mothered ways. Her husband had been damaged goods from the start, in a way, and it had been unkind of her to expect more than he was capable of. But she had not deserved to be cheated on. She had not deserved that. It was reasonable to be angry at him. With a feeling of great desolate purity she rose, and, as though she were carrying something very fragile, she took herself slowly out of the kitchen.

Outside, beyond the front windows, the lawn boy was starting his mower in the rain. He was a wiry, scowling boy of sixteen, but watching him pull fiercely at the mower’s cord again and again, Georgia felt a sudden flush of feeling for him—his long arm moving beneath his shirt-sleeve, his angled thigh, his square neck with its vulnerable pallor—though he was only Tony Barbaras and obviously had no interest in her at all. From her window she waved, but he was lost in his work, bent over his machine. At last the thing burst to life with a roar and he began pushing it up and down the wet lawn, his eyes fastened in front of him. Flecks of grass adhered to his tennis shoes. After each neat swath he made a smart pivot and returned, leaving another tidy path behind him. It was the plain, natural cruelty in his eyes that held Georgia’s gaze: as though he had an ancestral hatred for the grass, the mower, the bricks where the grass scattered itself, the world that had made the grass necessary. It was only that he was sixteen, and unfriendly in the way of most teenagers, but she could not look away. She was transfixed behind the glass. Oh, it was true: she could feel it: something was moving deep within her: some dark gesture of grief and sorrow was making its terrible way, at last, into the open.