"Like Adults" [Leland/Birdie]

[marguerite harvard d2a (zori)]

L e l a n d

What's so funny 'bout
peace, love and understanding?

(setting: Lockdown, week 6)

How many of you put down money that this wouldn’t have worked out?

Life goes on after the attack, just as sure as it always had.

A grainy video of the mill on the eastern side of the district going up in flames, roof collapsing, and scattering shit all of the place. I’d just sat down with a cup of coffee and an aspirin trying to rub the sleep out of my eyes that morning when they rattled off the number of casualties. No cause for alarm though – right – just a building coming down and ‘structural’ problems. Oh, but just to be safe, they were enacting a lockdown so that we could all shelter in place. Nothing out of the ordinary at all.

I’d thought about it for a half-second. Someone having a huge pair to set off some explosives and try to wind people up in district eight so that they’d finally rise up against the man and set us free. You know the types, a shadowy set whispering to one another dressed all in black ready to blow themselves to bits just for the revolution, or whatever it was they were trying to do. People that wanted to make the world a better place, get us up off the couch, and fight like hell just as we had near a hundred years ago.

Meh.

We took to the lockdown better than I could’ve thought we would. I mean, Birdie basically lived her life as though she was already under a quarantine, so just because someone told her she was supposed to be a shut-in wasn’t making much of a difference in her world. But a part of me had expected after the first night the two of us would be at each other’s throats for the littlest thing. Like – my underwear in a pile on the floor on my side of the bed. But there weren’t any blow ups, and here or there I managed to remember to put them in the gray laundry bin. I make her breakfast before heading out to work at the diner, and then I’m home again to make dinner.

I’d thought about going home to Arg and the apartment. In fact, the first few days, I’d come right up on the porch of Birdie’s house ready to tell her that I needed to get back to him and the plants, you know? Let her down gently, tell her that we both needed some space and to take care, I’d be back soon enough.

But every sunset at my back was another push forward. I’d get the spare key out from under the mat in front of the house (not really a ‘welcome’ mat when all it said was ‘home,’ Birdie always was literal) and push my way into the living room. Pistachio would chirp his way down the stairs and rub his way between my legs. I’d kneel down to scratch his ears before heading to the kitchen.

I bought groceries the third day, considering that the fridge contained a carton of expired milk, some frozen dinners, and a half-rotten head of cabbage. Stocked it full so that I could make a few things, some brioche for French toast, eggs, strawberries, lettuce for salad, chicken breasts, sausage, cold cuts – just a few things, for a few days. Had to make sure that at least one of us was eating, and if she wanted to pick at what I made, then, so be it.

I’d be cutting onion or tomato when the clock would tick right past seven, and – well, I wasn’t even legally allowed to go back home at that point.

And every morning I’d wake up next to her, breathe her in, and a part of me would warm up, too. I could wrap my arms around her, press my chest against her back, and think about how much I missed this. Feeling the way her chest would rise and fall. Listening to the sound of her breathing. The way the sunlight would come in through the crooked vinyl blinds and scatter all over her sheets. That it felt a bit like this could be a new normal because we were being told it had to be, strange as it was.

Oh, and that we fucked like we were going on sixteen again.

Tonight, I’d gotten paid which meant blowing all of it almost immediately.

We were six weeks into everyone else’s nightmare. I’d picked out one of the old records, something I’d force her to listen to when we were kids. Dimmed the lights (or rather, turned out one of the two lights in her living room). Spent less than half an hour on a buttery shrimp scampi, chopping up some garlic, throwing in shrimp, boiling linguini, little bits of parsley for some green on top. As I plated the pasta, I could hear Birdie on the stairs.

“Just a sec, babe,” I unscrewed the top to the bottle of white wine I’d bought and poured each of us a glass.

“You wouldn’t be-lieve the day I had out there.” I took a glass in each hand and moved to the living room. I extended a hand with her drink and smiled. “Arg showed up at the diner talking about how he’d had his wallet stolen again and asked for some money. And then my mom left a note asking why I hadn’t come to see her since ratmas.”

I tugged at the side of my cap.

“How are you? Good day? Bad?”

elegant

[goat]

Sometimes, Birdie misses having a job. She knows it’s the insane productivity culture talking, the way the Capitol views District citizens as worthless if they aren’t contributing to wealth they’ll never receive, but still, it gave her something to do. Before this, before everything had happened, she’d worked as a seamstress, tailoring dresses and coats and the like for people who could actually afford it. She could never imagine the luxury of buying a dress and having it cut and stitched to perfectly fit her shape, but she showed up every day to do it.

She’d been fired shortly after her daughter had been reaped. Not showing up to your scheduled shifts for a week will make that happen pretty quick. The skills are still there, bouncing around in her brain, more or less unused. She thinks she’s patched up maybe one skirt in the past few years. Her clothes need repair though, desperately. There are rips in T-shirts, buttons falling off jeans. If she’s going to be a real adult, or try to be, she can’t keep looking like she did when she was sixteen.

In the morning, she wakes up, eats the breakfast that Leland left her, and then pulls all the fucked up clothes out of her dresser. She takes inventory of everything— shit, she’s really let herself go. She knows she should have treated her things better than this, considering how little money she has to replace things. There’s an opportunity to slip into a moment of self hatred, she can feel it creeping at the edges of her mind, but she pushes it aside and goes to get her sewing kit.

Tears are closed, frayed edges are sealed, the things that are too far gone to be fixed are reluctantly shoved into the garbage. She pokes at her stitching and remembers when she used to embroider, but those days feel even farther away. There’s no time for hobbies anymore, not when you have to waste your time dealing with the cruelties of the world.

She can hear Leland making noise downstairs, back from work, but he hasn’t come up to see her, and she’s been too absorbed in her work anyway. As she hangs a mended sweater back in the closet, she notices the smell coming up from downstairs, which means dinner is ready. Having real food to eat for once feels like a way to be cared for.

It’s nice to be cared for.

“Just a sec, babe,” Leland says, as she descends the stairs. She pauses, almost at the last step, and then he turns the corner with two glasses of wine in his hand.

“I— what?” She reaches out and takes the drink, the cool of the glass sending a chill down her arm. “This is—”

It’s too much, I don’t deserve this, you’ve wasted too much on me.

“This is nice. Thank you.”

The words feel strange rolling off her tongue, like they’re somehow in a language she doesn’t speak. Thank you. It’s not that she doesn’t thank people, it’s that she doesn’t always mean it when she does. Sometimes, the words are just the easiest way to quiet a family member with bad advice, or to get a creep at the bar off your back. Thank you, I’ll take this into consideration, could you please fuck off now? Other times, she can’t justify accepting whatever she’s being given when she’s been conditioned to believe that she doesn’t deserve good things. Her instincts always tell her she’s unworthy, tell her to refuse the kindness, to push the person away. Giving thanks to somebody for something, and truly meaning it— it’s just been a while since she’s felt like she could, that’s all.

Leland beams as he tells her about his day— how Arg made a fool of himself yet again, how his mother did what she did best and made herself a pest. Birdie wouldn’t say she hates the woman— not in the way she hates her own mother, at least— but she definitely harbors more than resentment toward her. They’ve never been able to be in the same room without getting into at least one fight. The last time they saw each other, his mother had accused her of being too controlling, telling her that boys will be boys, as if that was some sort of justification for a father not wanting to be one. The fight eventually ended when Birdie threw a flower vase on the kitchen tile and walked back home without her shoes.

She wasn’t proud of it.

He asks her how her day was, fidgeting, like he’s almost unsure if he should ask, or he’s nervous about the answer. “My day was fine. Just fixed up some clothes.” Birdie takes a sip of the wine and relishes the dry, acidic taste. “You should probably tell your mom that she’s a bitch, and that’s why you don’t come by. You know she’s never liked me.”

[marguerite harvard d2a (zori)]

L e l a n d

What's so funny 'bout
peace, love and understanding?

(setting: Lockdown, week 6)

Looking at Birdie at the bottom of the steps, I couldn’t help but start to grin from ear to ear. Maybe I should have been bracing for the potential storm coming my way, but for just a second I got to take in something I feel like I’ve been waiting my whole life for: Birdie and I in the same house, living side by side, and shoveling away all the shit that’s stood in our way. We’re finally staring out on the horizon of a brand-new start, and all it took was a total collapse of our way of life to do it.

I guess sometimes you really did have to burn things down to the ground to get a better chance to start over.

She took the glass, and I braced for the pause in her reply. But the thank you that followed didn’t hold the sort of melancholy I’d been expected. You know, from sitting in this big house all by herself all day, thinking about all the things that she couldn’t change. All the thoughts that should’ve been miles away for a woman who’d given her whole heart to getting just another step forward. It was harder for her, I think, to get out of bed and stare out at the blue sky and think that she deserved any of it.

That doubt was something I’d never let creep in, and I don’t think I’d ever believed in so long as I’d known Birdie. She seemed to cradle all the sadness and despair that came her way, as though sheltering it might turn them into something beautiful. Meanwhile I walked right on by, leaving all those sad thoughts out in the cold. I had to keep reminding myself that she couldn’t live that way.

Birdie’d let those dark thoughts into this whole house to black out the windows and fill up the picture frames. She served them tea in the afternoons and slept with sadness underneath her pillow.

We’d all kept on thinking it was a phase that’d pass. I wanted to believe that her family kept a stiff upper lip mentality, and thought that this had always been the way Birdie was. A morose girl who’s feelings drifted and pulled her along so you never really knew who you were going to get. Except no one – not even me – took enough time to sit in the moment with her. To tell her that there was a chance she didn’t have to live this way; that standing next to her, we didn’t have to believe the world was as dark as it was.

“Fixed up some clothes?” I turned to set my wine glass down on the coffee table, and scooted to get the plates of scampi from the kitchen. I called out, “When’s the last time you did that, huh? Say if you’re looking to fix something up, I might need some pants taken in, if you’d believe it I think I’ve lost some weight in all of this lockdown nonsense. I think it’s from our extracurriculars.”

I set the plates down with a cheesy grin, and lay the silverware out beside them. I crashed back onto the loveseat, and tapped a hand down on the cushion beside me.

“Yeah, you know, it’s weird to think that Hilda and Pat are on the same wavelength.” Just mentioning the Hope matriarch made me wonder if I needed to grab some holy water. The old crone was liable to pop right out of one of Birdie’s mirrors at the mention of her name. Talk about a witch. “I’d put money down on Pat breaking first, though. She’d probably just tell me how disappointed she was in the next room loud enough so you could hear. You know. Classic mom!”

I twirled my fork around the pasta and took a sip of the wine. My mother hadn’t ever wanted me to be with Birdie, not from the moment I’d started talking about her way back in high school. She wasn’t lady enough for her only son, and I was going to get myself into trouble. She’d been half right, I guess – me getting myself into trouble.

elegant