Lolita

by Ivy Smyth

Olivia Champagne balanced the cage carefully in her left arm as she pushed the door open with her right. Her mother followed with a bag of antiques she couldn’t bear to leave in the hands of those sleazy flea-market shop holders, and her brother, Charles, slumped in last, closing the door behind him.

“Just set it over there, out in the sunroom, will you?” Mrs. Champagne groaned, regret for having given in to Olivia’s pleading already showing in her mood. Olivia did as she was told and for a moment all three of them stopped to peer in at the large green bird. It rubbed its beak in an agitated way against the iron bars of its ornate, too-small cage.

“Lolita?” Olivia called tentatively, using the name the man at the market had given her. The Amazon, as he had called it, stared back reproachfully and remained silent. That was the beginning.

Lolita continued to eat, sleep, and breathe in silence for the next week or so, but proved to be no particular trouble. Mrs. Champagne was grateful for that much, seeing as Steven was away on a business trip for the week and she had not consulted him about bringing the bird home. At least she could assure him it would make no difference to his life, one way or another. At least, that’s how it seemed. Until the day that Steven did return home.

Amid the usual reunion of hugs and kisses, Olivia slipped in a line about the bird. Mrs. Champagne, being secretly thankful that she had not been the one to tell Steven, was delighted when the man seemed unconcerned and didn’t even ask to see the thing. In fact, he was much too interested in telling them all the dull details of his trip to allow the subject to come up again that day. At night, when he and Mrs. Champagne were settling into bed (with a comfortable, pillow-width space between them), she casually said, “So glad you don’t mind about the bird, dear.”

He mumbled, “Oh no, shnookerummmmm…” and then began to snore.

The next morning Mrs. Champagne was awoken by the telephone ringing at 6am. Wondering who on earth would be calling at such an hour, she answered it only to find a dial tone at the other end. While she still held the phone to her ear, the ringing sounded again, only this time she was sure it came from the sunroom.

Sure enough, the covered cage continued to ring as Mrs. Champagne stood before it, ceasing only when she whipped the blanket off. The bird fixed her in its beady stare. She thought of telling it something like, “Now you stop that nonsense this instant,” but then she remembered that it was not one of her children, and speaking that way to an animal would have made her feel silly. She turned to leave.

“Brrrrrring! Hello Steve.”

Mrs. Champagne stopped dead in her tracks. She glanced back over her shoulder at Lolita, who looked innocent enough. She shook herself, and returned to bed.

It soon became common practice for the bird to imitate the telephone and attempt to answer whenever the real telephone rang with, “Hello Steve”. She also yelled, “Steve!” whenever the front door was opened or whenever anyone could be heard going up or down the stairs. Instead of being bothered by the whole thing as Mrs. Champagne initially feared, Steven seemed rather flattered to be the object of Lolita’s attention. He didn’t think it so odd that the bird had taken to him without him ever paying it a moment’s attention. After all, he was the man of the house—it made sense that the creature would focus on the most powerful presence.

One fine morning, about a week after his return home, Steven was searching for snacks in the kitchen pantry when he heard the squawky voice from the sunroom.

“Hello Steve,” said the bird, in a most friendly fashion. Steve decided then was the time to pay his respects. He entered the sunroom and found Lolita looking curiously at him through the bars of her cage, her head cocked to one side.

“Well hello there,” Steven said amiably, and cheerfully opened the cage door, offering Lolita his hand as a perch. She stepped up without hesitation and invited herself to climb up his arm. She came to rest at his shoulder and nuzzled his neck with her warm, grey beak, tickling Steven a bit. He laughed heartily. And that was the beginning of their relationship.

From that first bonding experience on, Lolita became blatantly hostile toward all members of the family other than Steven. She particularly detested Olivia, her supposed caretaker, and would screech menacingly every time the girl entered the sunroom. After being viciously bitten for the seventh time, Olivia quit feeding Lolita and announced to the family that she was not at all attached to the bird and wouldn’t mind at all if it should be displaced. Steven, however, protested and took over all caretaking duties without complaint. He whistled and conversed openly with Lolita every day as he changed the papers in her cage, filled her seed and water dishes, and provided new toys for her to devour. The bird was to stay.

In time, Steven quit locking Lolita up in her cage and allowed her to perch on top of it, or to accompany him about the house on his shoulder. She picked up new phrases quickly such as, “Olivia, you horrid girl!” “Do your homework”, “Breakfast!” and “If you say so.” Most often she simply repeated the words, “Steven dear” over and over.

About a month into Lolita’s stay, on a Saturday night when both of the kids were at sleepovers, Mrs. Champagne and Steven were in their bedroom, making love. To put the event in better context, this was something that happened between four and seven times a year, something that would renew the perfect, motherly lines in Mrs. Champagne’s face for another month or so. It was an act far more emotionally important to her than to Steven. Unfortunately for her, they were interrupted about twenty seconds in.

“STEVEN! OH GOD, YES!” came a perfect imitation of Mrs. Champagne’s desperate side from outside the bedroom door. Husband and wife became suddenly still and shared a glance through which each conveyed a set of completely different emotions. Mrs. Champagne felt heart-broken. Steven felt giddy.

Upon investigation, Mrs. Champagne found Lolita directly outside the bedroom door, clutching the banister with her scaly toes. After being bitten sharply, she managed to carry the bird downstairs. Lolita screamed, “Harder Steve, harder!” the whole way. Mrs. Champagne practically threw the bird into its cage before slamming the little metal door.

“You bitch!” she hissed. “I’ll have you out of my house, you’ll see.”

“Oh Steve,” Lolita moaned passionately.

The two females stared hard into each other’s eyes. The loser of the staring contest then returned to her suddenly unwelcoming bed.

When it got to the point where Lolita constantly blurted out her proclamations of lust to Steven all day, every day, including all hours that he was at work, every member of the family aside from Steven had his or her own plot to be rid of the bird. For Mrs. Champagne, this had gone far beyond personal. Her marriage was a strained perfection as it was, bordering between a sitcom relationship and something too cold to be human. It seemed to her then that the feathered demon living off her own nutrients under her own roof was consuming every ounce of warmth Steven may have had left for his wife. The thing had to go.

And yet, Steven would surely hold nothing but contempt for her should he find out she had done anything to harm the bird. How could she be rid of Lolita without taking any of the blame? She felt sure he would know. It was as if he suspected her already. And so Mrs. Champagne contented herself by locking the poor thing away in a dark closet every day while Steven was at work, and taking it out into the open again just before he was due back home.

Even a flawless routine is more likely than not to go wrong if done long enough. Sure enough, one day Steven chanced to come home a few hours early while his wife was out running an errand at the bank. As was current in his routine, the sunroom was the first place he went, fully expecting to see Lolita waiting for him. But she was not there. Not even her cage was there. Come to think of it, she had not even yelled “Hi Steve!” when he’d shut the front door. Steven immediately began to panic.

“LO-LO!” he yelled at the top of his lungs. “LO-LO!” he yelled so loud and frantically that he did not hear Mrs. Champagne enter the house.

“Steven! Steven! Darling, it’s alright.” She moved to comfort him, but he jumped back from her touch.

“Where is she?” he demanded, fearing the worst.

“It’s alright. I only had to put her in the closet for a little while.”

“What closet? Where? Why?”

Mrs. Champagne retrieved the cage, bird inside, from the coat closet. “She wouldn’t stop screaming. You know how she gets… It was the only way to keep her quiet.”

Steven glared back at her a moment, then snatched the cage, mumbling something about who needs quiet in an empty house. Mrs. Champagne went up to her bedroom to cry.

That evening Mrs. Champagne did not make dinner, an occurrence that no one was sure how to complain about for it had never happened before. Instead of dwelling on the impossible, Steven offered to take the family out, in a very masculine way. Thus, Lolita was left alone in her cage while the Champagnes all sat through a tense and trembly meal at The Olive Garden.

On the car ride home, Mrs. Champagne was imagining herself signing divorce papers. She tried to envision her hand very steady and her eyes full of steely confidence, but every time her imaginary self would dissolve into tears. She willed herself to stay calm the whole ride home. She willed herself to stay calm for as long as it took for Steven to finally decide he had no use for her. Her willing was interrupted by an expletive from the driver’s seat.

“What the hell?” Steven grunted in the fashion of a man who has lost control of something he thought was tucked firmly under his belt.

His wife looked up to see her own driveway. It was crowded with a fire engine and three police cars. Steven parked the car and immediately charged outside demanding, “What in God’s name is going on here?” After a few minutes of dazed silence, the rest of the family followed.

They found Steven listening to a burly man in uniform. “We are aware this may be an inconvenience for you, but think of the inconvenience and the money spent on our part. We were under the impression a woman was trapped. We are going to have to ask you to silence your animal, one way or another. A formal complaint has been issued by a neighbor, and the bird must remain quiet, or be confiscated.”

Steven was wearing his best ‘outraged’ face. “Now just a minute here, Godammit. Other people make noise. Why can’t Lolita make noise? Is it her fault you decided she was a trapped woman? I demand to see her!”

The officer nodded curtly. “You may see the animal. It is being removed from the house now. But I should inform you that the noise pollution your animal is creating has been deemed harmful to the public.”

“What in the blazes are you going on abou—”

“STEVE! HELP! STEVE! FIRE! STEVE! HELP! STEVE! HELP! FIRE!” Lolita’s screams were steady and ear-piercing. They continued throughout her trip into the back of the cop car.

Mrs. Champagne wept with relief.