Giovanna's 86 Circles: And Other Stories

Nose Dive

Nose Dive I had just climbed into bed when a powdery black bird with onyx eyes emerged from the fireplace flue. Its wings in motion were slow and choppy as if it were the creature’s first time in flight. Slipping on a robe and a pair of tennis shoes, I crawled out of bed, my untied laces dragging with each step. I propped the screen door open with a can of turpentine, grabbed the roller with the long handle that I had used to paint the apartment, and held it in my hand like a spear as I inched my way through the room in search of the bird. Its shadow had eclipsed the kitchen clock. I crossed the French doors and saw that it had landed in a pot that was soaking in the sink. As soon as I stood out of its path, the bird made a swift exit, anointing the linoleum floor with drops of black water. The bird and its shadow were gone, and the walls were bare again. My apartment was empty except for a bed, kitchen table, lamp with no shade, and the clock. I brought two suitcases when I moved to San Francisco, but I had yet to unpack them. The apartment felt no different than a hotel, and I never unpacked my suitcase when I stayed in a hotel. Rarely did I put my clothes in the empty 40 41 particle-board drawers because I knew I’d be leaving. And the only way I’d unpack now was if someone made me want to stay. Before I moved to this apartment, I had lived at a youth hostel in the YMCA at the Embarcadero downtown for a couple of weeks. Unbelievably cheap. Fifteen dollars a night and I discovered why. My window was so close to the freeway, it seemed as though I could stick my hands out and touch traffic. On a lumpy twin mattress, I watched as the big, boxy shadows engulfed the gray metal cabinet and then my bed before bulldozing through the cinder blocks behind me. I thought again of the man I flew three thousand miles to be with. I was three thousand miles too late. He said it was good that I didn’t stay with him until I found a place of my own. Better if we weren’t lovers anymore. Best we not get in the habit of seeing each other, even as friends. Unless I got in touch with him—this from someone who blended up a Brandy Alexander after my first viewing of Casablanca on the big screen and wrote me a poem that didn’t rhyme. He was the person who signed my organ donor card that same night because I was so sure he’d be with me when I died. He was the one who had me trudge nine thousand feet up a mountain to a rock jutting into the horizon just so he could tell me I was his best friend. Nothing separated us, not even the strand of hair blowing in my face that he brushed aside before we kissed. After the bird flew away, I found a smudge where its wing left an imprint on the freshly painted wall the way a priest uses his thumb to smear ashes on a Catholic’s forehead for Lent. When my landlady, Dorothy, came by the following day with a space heater, I told her that I had my first visitor. “When? Who?” “A bird flew in from the chimney last night. It frightened me there for a moment.” “You call that a visitor? You know what a wild bird inside the house is supposed to mean, don’t you?” Nose Dive “Bad luck. That’s what my mother believed anyway. Not me,” I insisted. I explained to Dorothy that a sparrow accidentally flew into our game room once when I was growing up. After that, my mother blamed that bird for everything bad that happened in our house. She said it was the reason I charged into a wall in the hallway and dislocated two toes. She believed it was responsible for our porch roof caving in and for termites in the woodwork. My mother went as far as to say that the bird was the reason our new wall-to-wall carpet had to be lifted and replaced three times because the...