Free Birds of Paradise: A Novel by Diana Abu-Jaber Page B

have started giving way to big mall-type places. And the more cranes and construction-site dump trucks that have clogged the streets, the more the people seem to change. There are still the elderly, trembling over walkers. There are still the crazy people, the wailers and lurchers, reeking drunks and meth-heads, the cadaverous, their skin shrunken to their bones. There are still people carrying animals—boas and cockatoos, Italian greyhounds, white roosters, fluffy coin-eyed monkeys, kittens in sailor suits. There are still middle-aged couples kissing on the street, still girls leading boys—or other girls—on leashes, exquisitely muscled, skin sparkling. But, increasingly, there are robust, generic “young people,” who might’ve grown up next door to Felice in the Gables or in Akron, Ohio, swarming to Sephora and Old Navy, elbowing away the ecosystem of marginalia. All connected somehow with the drone of construction, rumbling up from the waterfront.
    Felice checks out a few of the prettier, sylphlike girls they pass. Even the models look different, weirder, with broad, bony foreheads and no eyebrows. It occurs to her that it might already be too late to become a “real” model. Over the past few years, her arms have started to look sinewy and there’s a hardness setting in along her jawline. And the razor-eyed scouts and art directors miss nothing. The last few gigs she’s taken—holiday catalogs—the photographers tilted her face up into the lights, begging her to relax her jaw, soften her pupils.
    She and Emerson settle at the outdoor bar at El Tiki, a normally deserted place that only gets crowded after the cruise ships dock. Emerson buys her a margarita in a bowl-sized glass. He points out a rotating glass case of desserts, offers to get her something, but she says, “Ech. Look at the fondant on the layer cakes.” Besides, there’s a package of strawberry Twizzlers Emerson bought her at the 7-Eleven, now stashed in her rucksack. They joke around with each other, Felice twisting back and forth on her chair. She registers the dim, smiling faces around them at the bar—college kids from other cities. Emerson isn’t bad-looking, she decides as he tells her boyhood stories about swiping mangoes from the neighbors’ trees in Fort Lauderdale and selling them to spring-breakers.
    “Yeah, so when we gonna go to Oregon?” she cracks during a pause in their conversation. And Emerson’s head lifts; he’s off on his ideas for a car, supplies, a place where they can stay when they get there. He seems to be improvising some of it on the spot—but much seems premeditated. (“This guy I know—Johnny—he comes to the beach every March, but he lives in Lawrence—which is maybe halfway. He said I could always crash at his place if I start traveling.”) She listens, chiming in with her own suggestions (“We could stop in Wyoming on the way, and look at, like ranches”)—all of it a kind of sport.
    She can’t remember the last time she’s felt this good. Felice knows—it’s there like a bruise in the back of her mind—she can’t really go to Oregon, just as she knows the punishment doesn’t “run out.” And yet they linger at the bar through another round of drinks, talking. Emerson tells her about his terror of his childhood doctor and vaccinations. Felice volunteers a story about getting chicken pox, which fills her with strands of feelings she’d thought she’d shed a long time ago—the lost, unearthly sensations of being sick at home. As they talk, she gazes into the hotel courtyard beside the bar: a jumble of blue-glazed terracotta pots, sprawling aloes and ginger and birds-of-paradise, an assortment of cats skulking around the perimeters. The daylight has mellowed into pre-evening and in the distance, there is the mournful note of an ocean liner leaving port: a blue stain on the air.
    Now Felice and Emerson fall into a syncopation, they talk as if they’re catching up—rushing to fill in